GaiaLens' race for transparent, at-a-glance ESG reporting

Data-led ESG platform, GaiaLens, was established in 2021 with the aim of providing a data-driven, transparent, and real-time ESG-scoring analytics platform to institutional investors. The company firmly believes in environmental stewardship, social inclusion, and sound governance with a focus on cutting-edge technologies and the latest thinking in ESG investing.

Earlier this year, GaiaLens launched its one-of-a-kind, real-time ESG news service, GaiaLens Momentum, allowing investors to track ESG incidents and gather the latest available company data. Momentum captures and processes over 100,000 internet searches on more than 16,000 public companies every day across traditional news sources such as national media, specialist investment, and ESG trade media coverage, as well as relevant mentions on social media. This is most prominently evident in Momentum’s searches, which cover tweets from over 100 ESG thought leaders.

"GaiaLens Momentum helps investors see what is happening right now with companies’ ESG performance before it comes through in the ‘hard’ data. Processing this news data in real-time allows us to capture the ESG momentum of a given company and chart any progress in improving their overall ESG score,” Gordon Tveito-Duncan, co-founder and head of ESG Technology at GaiaLens, explained.

The service looks for both important company news and news on ESG themes related to specific facets of ESG principles, such as the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals, SASB, and Modern Slavery, as well as Gender Equality. The data sets gathered are then measured for consistency and transparency, prior to being scored in real-time across the E, S and G pillars.

How do GaiaLens and Momentum work for ESG reporting?

The company compiles and analyses both structured and unstructured data sets in addition to traditional financial data sets, ensuring that ESG-relevant data for approximately 16,000 public companies are gathered. Features such as diversity metrics are engineered by Machine Learning for the company and its related services. 

GaiaLens also implements Natural Language Processing (NLP) to help analyse and absorb news streams into its analytics platform, ensuring the analyses are broader and deeper than traditional analyst-led ESG-rating systems.

Non-relevant articles are filtered and removed, whilst the remaining articles are processed. The articles are scored in terms of relevance, quality, and categorisation using NLP. Meta-data, such as the date the articles are published, is also added.

There are two formats in which GaiaLens news service is offered to clients: the first service functions in a newsflow format, where all significant news linked to a company is provided, including articles and third-party social media posts; the second service works as an "ESG Incidents" feed, capturing all coverage linked to pre-identified live issues that companies are facing.

The ESG Incidents data feed format received a positive response during its pilot phase, where clients were allowed to input a portfolio. From the ESG Incidents data feed, emerging ESG events relevant to the portfolio companies were highlighted for observation and analysis.

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