RNS Reach                                                                                                                                          27 October 2021

MJ Hudson Group plc

(the "Company", "Group" or "MJ Hudson")

MJ Hudson releases award-winning digital ESG solution

ESG Advantage simplifies and streamlines ESG assessments for private markets   

MJ Hudson Group plc (AIM:MJH), the specialist service provider to the asset management industry, today announces the release of ESG Advantage, a unique digital solution that helps private market participants understand how they and their investments measure up from an ESG (environmental, social, and governance) perspective.

Institutional investors, fund managers and portfolio company management teams must comply with challenging regulatory requirements and satisfy increasing scrutiny on ESG and sustainability. ESG regulations are often complex, constituting thousands of pages of rules, making it extremely difficult to meet the deadlines set. The amount of data that must be collected and the number of disclosures that must be made continue to grow.

For fund managers, failure to comply with EU ESG regulations (such as the Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation ('SFDR'), which came into force in March, or the EU Taxonomy, timetabled for January 2022) will make it difficult to market funds to EU-based investors.

For institutional investors, beneficiary and stakeholder scrutiny has made ESG and sustainability a top priority and one where inadequate reporting is becoming unacceptable.

ESG Advantage, which is built on MJ Hudson's Advantage IQ platform, guides users through the assessment process in a step-by-step fashion, tracking important data and automating analysis and reporting. Following a successful and award-winning[1] pilot phase, ESG Advantage is now available to fund managers, institutional investors and other private market participants.   

Commenting on the release, MJ Hudson CEO, Matthew Hudson, said:

"As the demands on private market firms increase and ESG frameworks, regulations and standards increase day-by-day, the need to simplify and streamline ESG data collection and assessment is paramount. In Europe, the confusion surrounding impending SFDR requirements also ups the pressure on the asset management industry to fully integrate ESG. Designed specifically for private markets strategies, ESG Advantage streamlines the entire assessment and reporting process. It is important for the asset management industry to shine a strong light and create transparency and honesty into their hard work to build more sustainable funds and portfolio companies.

ESG Advantage is built into our end-to-end suite of asset management products and tools available from our proprietary data and analytics platform, Advantage IQ."

For more than 10 years, MJ Hudson has helped clients develop responsible investment policies, implement these throughout the investment life cycle and create shareholder value by tackling ESG risks and opportunities within underlying investments. ESG Advantage was developed by this team of ESG experts, who are on hand to provide tailored advisory services, as required. ESG Advantage harnesses the best of MJ Hudson's methodologies, industry frameworks and regulatory standards into a single platform to help clients determine what is most relevant and ensure compliance with existing and emerging regulations and standards, such as SFDR, EU Taxonomy, TCFD (Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures), and SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals).

Emma Bickerstaffe, Director of ESG and product lead for ESG Advantage, commented:

"As well as having a comprehensive knowledge of ESG regulations, we understand the practical challenges of data collection and analysis in private markets. This has allowed us to build a solution that drastically reduces the time and effort required to perform ESG assessments at the fund manager, portfolio and underlying company level. ESG Advantage is sophisticated and extremely powerful, but it is also efficient and easy to use."    

ESG Advantage is available now, on a subscription basis.

To learn more or book a demonstration, please visit www.esg-advantage.com or contact the team at clientsupport@esg-advantage.com.

For further information, please contact:

About MJ Hudson

MJ Hudson is a one-stop-shop specialist service provider to the US$100 trillion plus asset management industry, with a focus on its fastest growing segment, alternative investments (which includes private equity, venture capital, real estate and hedge funds).

As outlined at IPO in December 2019, our growth strategy is to develop and acquire new products and services that are needed by our core customer base of asset managers and institutional investors and to extend this customer base in the key markets of North America and Europe. Our strategy benefits from the underlying expansion of the alternative investment subsector and the continuing and growing need for outsourcing and specialist advice as regulation and competition makes operating more challenging for our clients.   

Founded in 2010 by CEO Matthew Hudson (a lawyer and former alternative assets fund manager), we have grown quickly to now support more than 1,000 clients, including 18 of the FTSE 100. Our business is transatlantic, with clients clustered around the major asset management centres of Europe and North America. Our team of 240 works out of 11 offices in those same centres.

For more information, please visit our website: investors.mjhudson.com/

Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/company/mj-hudson /  

Twitter: www.twitter.com/MJHudsonCorp