William Cox
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How creating your own LLM could help you think and act like your investors
AI investor cloning can help remove guesswork Recently Blackstone announced its plans to invest $500 bn in Europe over the next years. Did you see this coming and will some this capital flow into your company? Imagine if your governance team could predict with some certainty what your investors are going to think, say and do with respect to your company. In fact, doing just that has become a lot easier and more accurate using the AI toolset to clone investor AI programs. Most articles on how AI can help investors are about detecting general investor trends, analyzing sentiment and…
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Will IFRS S1 and S2 help make ESG reporting easier and more meaningful?
ISSB’s new standards could have significant impact on climate-related disclosures Director training and education is one of the keys to ensuring boards can fulfill their duties while adapting to changing circumstances affecting the company. Corporate secretaries and other governance professionals play the central role in planning for necessary information to be passed to the board, either from themselves or through in-house or external advisers. There’s no one-size-fits all approach but there are important lessons to help the board succeed and avoid potential problems. An effective director training program helps create a foundation for a high-functioning board that can oversee risk…
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Why so many ESG reporting standards miss the point
Investors need less data, more focus, says Dr William Cox A current study of ESG reporting by 4,500 US and European companies finds between 50 percent and 75 percent of 2022 ESG data reported was unnecessary to comply with regulations and satisfy the guidelines of relevant investment funds. Yet companies are outdoing each other in producing sustainability reports of 200-300-pages, which makes it difficult for investors to wade through the data noise. The average listed company spends $675,000 annually on ESG data and ratings, with asset managers shelling out $1.4 mn, according to a survey by the SustainAbility Institute by…
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The governance data that can impress investors – and why
A passive approach to governance data can be a disadvantage, says Dr William Cox Why do investors focus on governance? Well, numerous studies have shown a positive connection between good governance and higher stock prices as well as easier and cheaper access to capital. But there are plenty of cases where supposedly ‘good’ governance turns out to be a rotten apple. One reason can be that checking the boxes on governance structures can easily disguise dangerous weaknesses in actual governance and management. This passive approach did not prevent governance meltdowns such as Enron, WorldCom, Lehman Brothers and, recently, Signa. They…
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Which social numbers really matter to investors?
Listed companies spend a lot on social programs, but what do shareholders care about? William Cox discusses Public companies are under increasing scrutiny over their ESG claims. Around the world, investors, regulators, politicians, campaign groups, protesters and a host of sometimes unlikely stakeholders are voicing their concerns over the climate crisis, human rights, supply-chain management and more. As the world passes a stark milestone – with global warming exceeding 1.5ºC across an entire year for the first time, according to the EU’s climate service – Governance Intelligence sister publication IR Magazine hears from Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth, about…
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Which environmental numbers really matter to investors?
Actionable data is more important than high volume Recently, the head of ESG at a blue-chip asset manager that is paying more than $200,000 annually for ESG data told me: ‘Once we get this ton of data from a major data provider, our work just begins. We have to make some financial sense of it.’ His remark points to a fundamental problem with ESG data and the $50 tn ESG investment market: there are too many indicators and too much non-actionable data. For an investor, knowing how many tons of greenhouse gases a company emits annually says little, if anything,…