It's That Time of The Year Again... |
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A Year In Review for the S-Factor: |
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During this year alone, The S-Factor has been nominated for and won over 10 different awards, some of which we have highlighted for you below.
What is most exciting about these acknowledgments is not only the accolades for our foresight and hard work in recent years, but it also signals the direction and momentum of a market that is seeking change for the better. The the market is paying attention to products like ours that can help them achieve their desired change. Whether investors are negative screening, seeking best in class, hedging risk, seeking compliance, mission aligning — the quality, relevancy, and materiality of S-Factor data can help them achieve these goals.
The S-Factor Team is committed to fulfilling the "Social Data Gap" in a factual way in order to help investors make the right decisions that are most impactful.
We cant wait to share with you the news of our many new clients, partners, and product features in 2022, most of which have been in development throughout 2021.
For now, from our team and families to yours, we would like to wish you a safe and merry holiday season and we look forward to an incredible year of positive change ahead for 2022!
The S-Factor Team
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S-Factor is actively fundraising for growth!
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Our focus for the year ahead... |
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It is during this time of year when we take heed to evaluate our progress and decide where to focus for the New Year.
What we do know, is that we don't have to look too far to remember the state that the world is in right now, and how much more work across the social factors we have yet to do in 2022.
Navigating this rapidly changing platform of impact and mission investing — we must continuously remind ourselves of the purpose behind our mission.
Why do we want to help better inform the marketplace on social impact factors and behavioral outcomes?
Not only because there is a strong correlation over a 7-year history in the S-Factor dataset which demonstrates that top social factor performers, or best-in-class, are outperforming the market but because in order to perform against the S-Factor criteria, a change in behavior is required to affect positive outcomes-based societal impact. That is why we do what we do.
It is S-Factor's purpose-driven mission to influence the movement of capital, with factual content, scaling the number of users of Social Factor data, in order to affect more poignant and specific outcomes.
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S-Factor is the perfect blend of innovation, it marries social impact subject expertise, technological advancements in normalizing big data (structuring from unstructured sources), and its methods challenge the boundaries of the fundamental quantitative analytics. They are challenging historical methods by example.
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Our Top Social Factor Trends to Watch in 2022:
1) Materiality: Five leading framework and standard-setting organizations—CDP, CDSB, GRI, IIRC, and SASB—announced a shared vision for a comprehensive corporate reporting system that includes both financial accounting and sustainability disclosure, connected via integrated reporting. The joint statement outlines how existing sustainability standards and frameworks can complement generally accepted financial accounting principles (Financial GAAP). Read more about the joint statement and its significance.
This amalgamation is fast-tracking a universalism or global standard for ESG criteria which is ultimately considered financially material. The S-Factor solution is mapped to each of these frameworks and their requirements, providing versatility so that investors can choose their themes and alignment.
2) Transparency: The problem? Historically, ESG data has been "noisy" and unreliable.
The correlation among prominent agencies’ ESG ratings determined by MIT's Aggregate Confusion Project was on average 0.61; by comparison, credit ratings from Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are correlated at 0.92. This ambiguity around ESG ratings creates acute challenges for investors trying to achieve both financial and social returns. The groups' five-member company, the "Sustainability Initiative" is working to solve this problem through a program of research to improve the quality of ESG measurement and decision making in the financial sector. The S-Factor solution (ESG 2.0) is working to provide complete transparency on source content informing the scores and ratings, with a concentrated "norm" across all the frameworks mentioned above in number 1) Materiality frameworks, and as well as much more pertinent to social factors and societal outcomes and impacts.
3) A Shift to Social: Basic social indicators such as company reported Health and Safety incident tracking or Women on Boards has shifted to a deeper dive on Labour, Slavery, Women & Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion - but especially in the supply chain. The leading ESG issue, based on the total number of shareholder proposals filed in 2020 and 2021 was not in fact carbon-related, but according to US SIF: Labour and Employment equity specific.
While the emergence of the focus on diversity may be new to some, the evolution of regulations across the world in modern slavery and labor standards such as the ILO and Canada and the UK and European Bans which are crippling already covid-devastated supply chains and product mobility from jurisdictions with known forced labor practices are rapidly progressing to imposed trade restrictions (see TOP GLOVE and Uyghur).
The results of these and other studies demonstrate profound and disproportionately negative impact on Women. Statistics on Forced Labour, Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking, from the International Labour Organization, tell us that an estimated 40.3 million people are in modern slavery, including 24.9 million in forced labor and 15.4 million in forced marriage; 71% of which are women and girls.
S-Factor's subject-exerts have been following the evolution and emergence of these frameworks for decades. The S-Factor solution can inform, monitor, and alert investors to these social risks, and ensure compliance, and performance in accordance with these frameworks.
In 2022, S-Factor will unpack the diagnostics, share applied cases studies focussed on specific outcomes, quantitative strategies, and integrated social factor performance.
We hope that you will continue to join us on our journey as we amplify S-Factor's impact across the globe.
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Below is a summary of just some of the notable achievements that the S-Factor was able to accomplish during 2021. We're excited to see what we can do in 2022!
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S-Factor has been selected for a position in the "MassChallenge FinTech Incubator Program" for 2022.
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On the back of winning our UBS awards, and the MassChallenge FinTech cohort placement, we have also been notified that The S Factor are shortlisted for "ESG Advocate of the Year" in New York's prestigious Private Asset Management (PAM) Awards. This is an award we won first place for in 2020. |
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S-Factor took home 1st prize in UBS's Future of Finance Challenge for the Sustainable Banking Category. There were over 400 fintech applicants in total, 40 finalists and 10 short listed in this category. |
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Our CEO, Bonnie-Lyn de Bartok was named one of the Top 10 Global Female FinTech Founders in 2021. |
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S-Factor's CEO was recognized as one of Canada’s Top Women in FinTech & Blockchain celebration. |
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In July 2021, The S-Factor was named one of one of the top 14 social impact startups and companies in Canada by Best Startup Canada. |
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In September 2021, The S-Factor was named by Daily Finance as one of 97 Leading Ontario Risk Management Firms and Startups. Companies were picked across the size spectrum from cutting edge start-ups to established brands. |
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On June 25, 2021, The S-Factor was named by Futurology as one of the 36 most innovative Toronto based companies. |
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S-Factor was a part of the winning ESG Hackathon team alongside Accern, Axiomatic Data, Aza-Soyul, Carbon4Finance, Covalence, Global Data, and LinkUp! Eagle Alpha included the findings from this competition in a white paper below titled
"Blending Alternative Data for ESG" - free to download below for more information.
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New Partnership Announcements: |
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As a result of winning 1st place in UBS's Future of Sustainable Finance Award and our CEO being named one of the Global Top 10 Female Fintech Founder's of the year in November 2021, S-Factor has several new partnerships within the UBS organization but also with affiliates and cohorts of the completion.
Check out some of these new partnerships below...
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Investor Readiness Program led by Delilah Panio of Fortuna Funding. Fortuna empowers women entrepreneurs (like ours!) to create their ideal fund strategy, through educational programs, business coaching services, and unique live events.
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As part of this program, UBS has sponsored the S-Factor to be a SheEO Activator for 2022. SheEO is a global community of radically generous women + non-binary people transforming how we fund and support entrepreneurs. Activators contribute to help create a perpetual fund for women and non-binary-led Ventures working on the critical issues we see around us - what SHEEO calls the World’s To-Do List.
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Hot off the press! S-Factor wins a spot in the MassChallenge FinTech cohort for 2022! |
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MassChallenge FinTech (#MCFT) combines the power of innovation and entrepreneurship to advance scalable digital solutions by fostering collaborations between their corporate partners and startups. By bringing FinTech’s most promising startups together with the financial sector’s strongest brands. The cohort creates opportunities to innovate and solve some of the industry’s most pressing challenges.
This year's MCFT partners were focused on 1) Customer Experience, 2) ESG, 3) DeFi, and 4) Advisor Tools. Some of this year's incredible sponsors included Fidelity Investments, Manulife, MassMutual, Putnam Investments, AARP, City of Boston, KPMG, US FinTech Sandbox, The Financial Revolutionist, Wells Fargo, LendingClub, SEI Ventures, and Laika Goodwin.
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Although the MCFT team and Partners were overwhelmed by 100s of applicants and the level of talent in this year’s Semi-Finalist pool, The Social Factor Data Company has officially been selected to participate in MassChallenge FinTech Incubator for FY 2022! As a result of the S-Factor's acceptance to participate, the firm will be partnered with the following incubator advisors in order to amplify its impact throughout 2022. Meet S-Factor's new partners and advocates:
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Meet Phil Kim, based in San Francisco, he is the SVP and Global Head of ESG Product at State Street. He is the former SVP, Senior Product Development at Fact Set and prior to that the Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer at TruValue Labs.
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Meet Jason Guenther, the Senior Vice President Technology, Agile and Product Management, Cloud and Machine Learning for Putnam Investments located in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
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Meet J.J. Malfettone, he is Leading KPMG’s Market Intelligence and Analytics team as the Director, Growth & Strategy based in New York.
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The Team at S-Factor is incredibly excited to get to work with these cohorts in the new year! The team is also very grateful for the opportunity MassChallenge has presented and we look forward to sharing with you our exciting new developments along the way as a result.
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Most recently, S-Factor collaborated with Erik McBain, Director of Growth at Boosted.ai an artificial intelligence software for investment managers looking to create more value in their equity portfolios.
The S Factor solution has detected two sources of alpha in its historical testing. The partnership sought greater input from more quantimental focussed experts but we also wanted to trial these backtests through already tried and tested machine learning quant models to see what else we can learn from our data and determine how we can translate the Social Factor results into financial outcomes in a language that investors can understand.
Stay tuned for the release of an upcoming white paper in January 2022 which will go into much greater detail on the results and outcomes from this engagement, and other alpha testing.
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In December, The S Factor Co. signed a partnership agreement with Fundata to incorporate thousands of global fund analytics into the S-Factor Solution.
This will allow for S-Factor to provide greater insight to fund and portfolio managers on their funds and underlying constituents with Social Factor performance.
Founded in 1987, Fundata began by collecting and distributing investment fund pricing to local newspapers and businesses. Over the past three decades, Fundata has evolved into a multi-national data distributor and investment fund data and analytics company. The information they provide currently reaches over 80,000 advisors, millions of investors, and scores of institutions every day through our network of newspapers, web, and corporate clients across North America.
While the S-Factor data set currently covers the entire global public equity market and the S-Factor external risk tool considers Sovereign socio-economics, ESG and SDG performance, the partnerships with Fundata will add to this landscape social factor performance associated with fund flows and will offer managers more predictive signals and outlier events, both positive and negative to be cognizant of, as it relates to societal benefit or detriment in association with their investment choices.
The emergence of the trend whereby investment managers will equally be held to account for the behavior and impact outcomes of their investees is imminent under the auspices of redefining "fiduciary care" and a different kind of risk-adjusted return. S-Factor is looking to play a role in "future-proofing" investments' social risks in greater detail, at the speed of triggering events.
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On November 17th, 2021 it was announced via PRESS WIRE, New York, NY, United States that S-Factor has partnered with FinTech Studios, a leading AI-based platform for market intelligence & regulatory intelligence, a multi-year partnership agreement to integrate FinTech Studios AI-based market intelligence, widgets and analytics into the S-Factor Data Analytics platform, helping to bring better transparency to the S-Factor Scores and Ratings.
This partnership will allow S-Factor to better serve our clients’ needs and pain points as ESG 2.0 requires moving beyond black box scores and includes more transparency, validity, and materiality on content informing the criteria and ratings. Our partnership with FinTech Studios allows us to provide the highest quality ESG rating and scores for social impact.
You can learn more by clicking here.
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S-Factor Media & Publication Highlights from 2021 |
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On September 7, 2021 Eagle Alpha produced a spotlight white paper called, “NLP & AI For ESG Analysis” in which the The S-Factor Co. is featured.
In the ESG landscape, some of the pain points for asset managers, are a lack of comparable, high-quality, high-frequency raw data, a lack of standardized definitions of sustainable activities, conflicting ESG taxonomies, and divergence in scoring, and methodologies across traditional ESG data vendors. The S-Factor proves to solves some of the industry’s biggest issues.
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On August, 23, 2021 Eagle Alpha produced a spotlight white paper titled, “ESG – Social Data” in which The S-Factor Co. is featured. With the introduction of new sustainable finance disclosure regulations and taxonomies from the UN and across the EU, North America, and Asia, it is more important now more than ever to understand ESG data and where investors can source reliable ESG data. |
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On June 29, 2021 Alternatives Watch produced a special report called, "Finding the S in ESG" in which The S-Factor Co. is featured. The report, which sought the opinions of a broad range of investors to get an idea of how far the discussion of social justice has come in the world of institutional investing. |
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On August 17, 2021, Eagle Alpha held a virtual ESG Hackathon in New York. The S Factor Co. was a part of the winning team. Here is a copy of the results in Eagle Alphas white paper: "Blending Alternative Data for ESG Investing. The S-Factor is featured for their contributions to a blend of alternative data sets for ESG and the signals and raw data content leading to those signals in tandem with other providers |
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Bonnie Lyn de Bartok, founder and CEO of the S-Factor, a company that has automated social implications in investments, joined BNN Bloomberg's Amanda Lang to discuss why factoring the “S” in ESG investing is necessary.
She claims that considering socio-cultural and socio-political implications can save all parties time and money.
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The S in ESG. What it IS and what it is NOT. Founder and CEO Bonnie Lyn de Bartok joins the Wall Street Green Summit in May of 2021 to discuss the social vertical of ESG.
An education which dives into regulations, technology, key trends and suppliers. Everything you need to know about S in ESG.
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From The S-Factor Team, we can not wait to share with you so much more in the coming year...
Happy Holidays and on to a Prosperous New Year!!!
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Questions? Contact Us Today! |
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401 Bay Street Suite 2702
Toronto, Ontario M5H 2Y4
Toronto +1 647 930 9075
Toll Free +1 877 276 4822
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