Webinar Replay: Sustainability Advantage or Burden

The ESG landscape for U.S. private equity firms is increasingly defined by systemic governance pressure and rising social and environmental scrutiny. Governance issues at firms such as Blackstone, KKR, Thoma Bravo, TPG, and Francisco Partners primarily focus on deal processes, disclosure practices, and investor protection. These concerns encompass settlements related to pension mismanagement, actions taken by the Department of Justice regarding pre-merger filings, as well as lawsuits and shareholder investigations examining the fairness of take-private transactions and stock buybacks. On the social side, exposure is driven largely by portfolio companies and political positioning. Housing and tenant-rights disputes sit alongside allegations of labor abuses, child labor, and unsafe conditions. Environmental concerns are increasingly prominent, with major companies facing criticism for their exposure to fossil fuels, their impact on climate change, and associated lobbying efforts.

What are the most pressing ESG challenges currently facing the U.S. private equity firms? Read on to find out.

Blackstone: Governance Pressure, Social Backlash, and Climate Criticism

Blackstone is facing a wide range of ESG controversies. Governance challenges include a $227.5 million settlement related to Kentucky pension mismanagement, a $590 million lawsuit involving SPAC Recovery Co. that alleges a fraudulent scheme, and SEC fines tied to off-channel communications failures. On the social front, the firm has drawn criticism for political spending that heavily favors right-leaning candidates, child-labor incidents, and recurring safety violations at portfolio companies. Housing-related concerns also persist, with tenant protests over rent and eviction practices and university movements calling for divestment from Blackstone-linked real estate funds. Environmentally, Blackstone continues to be targeted by climate activists for its fossil fuel exposure and its perceived contribution to escalating climate risks.

Key Controversies:

• Kentucky pension mismanagement lawsuit settled for $227.5 million
• SPAC Recovery Co. Files $590 Million Lawsuit Against Blackstone
• Kelly Ayotte’s oversight failures blamed for child labor abuses at Blackstone-backed company
• Stuy Town tenants win lawsuit to keep apartments rent stabilized
• Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman Is Targeted at His New York Home by Climate Activists

Reach out to SESAMm

TextReveal’s web data analysis of over five million public and private companies is essential for keeping tabs on ESG investment risks. To learn more about how you can analyze web data or to request a demo, reach out to one of our representatives.

We are thrilled to announce that SESAMm was selected to demo at the exclusive Finovate Europe event on March 22nd – 23rd in London, UK. This comes on the heels of SESAMm receiving the 2022 HFM US Technology Award for “Best Use of Artificial Intelligence or Blockchain Technology.”

Finovate Europe invites a selection of European Fintech leaders to discuss and showcase the latest technology innovations and trends in the industry. CEO Sylvian Forté will demonstrate SESAMm’s latest innovation TextReveal® Streams, at the event, live on the main stage. Streams is a ready-to-use alternative dataset. It provides daily sentiment analysis and ESG data mapped to public and private firms leveraging SESAMm’s NLP (Natural Language Processing) powered engine to fuel investment strategies.

SESAMm owns a proprietary 13 years historical data lake containing over 17 billion articles publicly sourced from more than 4 million sources (blogs, forums, social networks, etc.). This represents 10 to 100 times more information than that of our competitors. SESAMm works with Hedge Funds, Private Equity, and other financial firms to help them generate alpha, gather exclusive insights, and tailor unique analytics.

Join us with over 1000 senior attendees, 50+ demoers including SESAMm and its CEO Sylvain Forté, and 70+ insightful speakers. In addition to demonstrating our latest innovation on stage, our team will also be available to perform 1:1 demos in the exhibit hall area. If you’re attending the event, stop by to say hi!!

SESAMm is proud to announce the launch of our latest solution: TextReveal® ESG Alerts. TextReveal ESG Alerts identifies ESG risks¹ and positive impact coverage² in over 100 languages by tracking mentions of your entire portfolio across 20 billion historical articles with millions of new ones added daily in near real-time.

¹ Inspired by SASB and other major standards.
² Based on UN SDGs.

Why use TextReveal ESG Alerts for your portfolio

Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) ratings have become a conventional measure of a company’s risk against those business areas. They are also increasingly critical as legislation and stakeholders focus on sustainability, positive impact initiatives, and corporate social responsibility (CSR). So with the practice of ESG rating, investors have been able to use those scores to make decisions about their portfolios. Of course, investors are committed to a greener future, too.

Unfortunately, traditional ESG ratings come with challenges. For example, according to Andrew McLaughlin, a contributor to The Globe and Mail, many ESG rating providers are “popping up like dandelions,” and “each uses its own methodologies to rank and score publicly traded companies based on their purported environmental, social and governance risk and performance.” Further, you might have access to ratings, but they’re only updated once per quarter or once yearly.

With SESAMm’s TextReveal ESG Alerts, you can access consistent, timely daily data on five million public and private companies to better assess risks and receive early warnings.

The model can calculate sentiment for each company by analyzing the news of individual companies. It’s also possible to create a composite to measure the sentiment related to a stock index. The sentiment data also helps management and investor relations because it provides a quantitative means of understanding the extent to which investors are concerned about certain news about their company.

Verifying the results

Verification using Japanese has revealed that the timing of bottoming and ceiling of text sentiment precedes those of stock prices. The collaborating team compared the performance of:

• A model that uses only orthodox financial and economic data as inputs
• A model that considers NLP and financial and economic data, confirming that the latter could generate higher alpha

The TextReveal ESG Alerts edge

Broad coverage

Access five million private and public companies of all sizes, including micro-caps, to identify risks in over 100 languages.

Expertise

Leverage ninety pre-built yet taxonomy-adaptable ESG risk categories such as SASB standards, UN Global Compact, and UN SDG-based positive impact statistics coverage.

Transparency

Gain insights with deeper analysis, seeing specific articles driving your alerts.

Timeliness

View live web data for forward-looking scores and insights.

TextReveal ESG Alerts features

Because we trained them on a representative corpus selected from billions of articles from prestigious news organizations, local news, and discussion forums, our NLP tools can understand finance and interpret slang, misspellings, and textspeak.

Read more:

• “What Investors Ought to Know About Natural Language Processing: A Quick Guide”
• “What Investors Ought to Know About Knowledge Graphs: The Core of Text Analysis”
• “What Investors Ought to Know About Data Lakes: A Quick Guide”

The best part is that you can receive alerts and monitor scores in the way that works best for you. ESG and UN SDG‐based positive impact statistics can be accessed and delivered via:

Email Alerts

CRM and cloud based integration

Live dashboards

API and data files

ESG studies

Get the SESAMm edge from TextReveal ESG Alerts

Save time vetting your current investments and evaluating new ones while providing higher quality, objective results compared with manual monitoring, black-box ratings, or self-reported questionnaires.

Reach out to a SESAMm representative for a personal demo today.