Bringing greater transparency to sustainable debt markets through data
Environmental Finance Data (EF Data) continues to expand its sustainable debt intelligence platform, providing investors, issuers and intermediaries with increasingly granular market data. Its head of product strategy, Ben Smith, discusses how EF Data is evolving to meet the changing needs of the sustainable finance market in 2026
Environmental Finance: How is EF Data keeping pace with sustainable debt market developments
Ben Smith: Whilst headwinds buffeted the sustainable debt market in 2025 – with a 7% drop in the value of sustainable bonds issued and a 9% drop in sustainable loan volumes - our data shows the continued resilience in the market.
Sustainable debt has become significantly more sophisticated over the past few years, and our platform has evolved alongside it. While green, social, sustainability and sustainability-linked instruments remain at the core of the market, we’re also seeing growing activity in areas such as transition finance, blue finance, adaptation and resilience, nature-related financing and increasingly bespoke labelled structures.
EF Data has tracked the sustainable debt market since its inception, and today our platform provides one of the industry’s most comprehensive datasets, with almost 50 interactive data fields covering sustainable bonds and loans. Users can analyse the market through a wide range of filters, including geography, issuer type, sector, currency, use of proceeds, SDG-alignment, framework standards, taxonomy alignment, external reviews and post-issuance reporting.
One area where we’ve continued to increase granularity and transparency is sustainability-linked finance. Although sustainability-linked bond issuance has remained selective, sustainability-linked loans continue to evolve rapidly. Our dataset captures detailed information on KPIs, sustainability performance targets (SPTs), observation dates, pricing mechanisms and step-up and step-down structures, enabling users to assess not just issuance volumes but instrument quality.
European Green Bonds (EuBGs) enjoyed a strong showing in 2025 and H1 of 2026, and we have expanded our EuGBs coverage to include all documentation including frameworks, second-party opinions (SPOs), factsheets, external reviews and project-level post-issuance reporting.
EF: How do you ensure EF Data provides accurate and comprehensive market coverage?
BS: Data quality and coverage have always been a top priority for us.
Our specialist analyst team manually sources, verifies and enriches every transaction before it enters the database. We continue to reconcile our sustainable bond coverage with more than 30 lead managers and lenders on a quarterly basis, helping us maintain coverage and add granularity to our data set.
Loan data has traditionally been more fragmented, but transparency continues to improve. We now work closely with more than 20 major lenders, alongside borrowers and advisers, to expand both market coverage and data granularity. As sustainability-linked lending continues to mature, this collaborative approach enables us to build an increasingly complete view of the global sustainable loan market.
EF: What differentiates EF Data from other sustainable finance data providers?
BS: Granularity and user experience. We aim to make comprehensive micro and macro market mapping and peer comparison a quick and easy task.
EF Data covers both sustainable bonds and loans within a single platform, allowing users to analyse the market holistically rather than through separate datasets. Our organisation profiles bring together activity across issuers, borrowers, lead managers and lenders, providing a complete view of each participant’s sustainable finance activity.
Granularity is another major strength. Beyond issuance data, subscribers can access detailed information on frameworks, external reviews, sustainability targets, and post-issuance allocation.
Our integrated resource library now includes tens of thousands of supporting documents - including frameworks, second-party opinions, allocation reports, impact reports, and other issuer disclosures streamlining due diligence requirements significantly.
Subscribers also benefit from Environmental Finance’s market-leading journalism, including daily news, exclusive interviews, market analysis, webinars and research, all accessible within the platform.
Over the past year we’ve also enhanced our analytics capabilities with interactive dashboards, downloadable visualisations and custom portfolio analysis tools that allow users to benchmark issuers, sectors and regions in just a few clicks.
EF: What can users expect from EF Data over the next year?
BS: One of our biggest priorities is expanding post-issuance transparency.
Our allocation data module already enables users to analyse how proceeds have been deployed after issuance, providing much greater visibility into capital flows than issuance data alone.
The next phase is expanding our impact data capabilities. Throughout 2026, we’ll continue developing our impact data gathering, extraction and metric standardisation with a view to launching our bespoke impact data service towards the end of the year.
We’re also investing in new analytics, enhanced API functionality and AI-assisted search capabilities that allow users to interrogate large volumes of sustainable debt data more efficiently while maintaining the high data quality standards our subscribers expect.
As sustainable finance continues to mature, investors increasingly require transparent, decision-useful information rather than simply more data. Our objective is to provide the market with the tools needed to analyse sustainable debt with greater confidence, consistency and insight.
For more information about Environmental Finance Data, visit efdata.org.
