ISS STOXX - Ratings & Rankings
Data category
- Environmental data
- Governance data
- Indices/Exchange data
- Rankings
- Ratings
- Research data
- Social data
- Verification/Certification/External opinion
The data offers solutions for:
- Environmental impact analysis and insight
- Investment decisions and portfolio insight
- Nature-based information
- Nature-based information: Biodiversity
- Nature-based information: Land use
- Nature-based information: Oceans
- Nature-based information: Water
- Reporting: CSRD
- Reporting: Impact
- Reporting: Other Regulations
- Reporting: TCFD
- Reporting: TNFD
- Reporting: UN SDGs
- Social impact analysis and insight
- Network security risk
Who are the data users?
- Corporates
- Financial institutions
- Government
- Investors
- Trustees
- Data is used by a broad range of institutional investors, asset managers, asset owners, fund managers, banks, government institutions, universities and research firms.
Brief description of the data offering
ISS STOXX's ratings and rankings offer industry-leading research and detailed data on companies, countries, municipalities, and funds, providing investors with the in-depth insight to effectively incorporate sustainability in their investment decision. Solutions include:
- ESG Corporate Rating evaluates companies’ ESG-related risks, opportunities, and impact along the corporate value chain.
- ESG Country Rating analyses the sustainability performance and risks of all EU, OECD, and BRICS countries and other important sovereign issuers from Asia and South America.
- ESG Fund Rating provides financially material & holistic sustainability signals at the fund level, leveraging our Corporate and Country Ratings.
- ESG Muni QualityScore offering fixed-income investors detailed and transparent ESG rankings, scores, and underlying data for municipal bonds in all 50 states in the U.S.
- Sustainability Bond Rating: a relevant assessment of sustainability impact and risk exposure for global labelled debt.
- Environmental & Social Disclosure QualityScore, a data-driven scoring and screening solution designed to help measure and identify areas of E&S risk through company disclosure.
- Governance QualityScore provides critical and easily digestible governance data, enabling a holistic risk assessment.
- Cyber Risk Score employs a standardized, data-driven approach to provide visibility into the level of cyber readiness and resilience an organization has implemented.
- SDG Solutions Assessment assesses the positive or negative impact a company‘s product and service portfolio has towards achieving the UN SDGs.
- SDG Impact Rating is a holistic measurement of the positive or negative impact on the UN SDGs across the pillars of products & services, operations, and controversies.
- EVA Financial Data leverages an established standard in measuring, analyzing, projecting, valuing, and discounting a firm’s underlying economic profit rather than its accounting profit.
Where and how do you source your data?
Data is primarily sourced from publicly available information, including a company’s own disclosure and reporting, proxy statements, reputable news, governmental and international institutions, recognised international or local non-governmental organizations, and non-biased subscription databases such as the CDP.
During the ESG Corporate Rating process, considerable importance is attached to the dialogue with the company under evaluation. Every other year, we provide companies with the opportunity to comment on and add to the provisional findings by submitting a draft rating report to the company for revision. After the period of consultation, the report is finalized, integrating the comments and additions that are deemed appropriate by the analyst in charge of the rating.
Cyber Risk Score
The Score is based on a combination of compiled information sourced from third parties (such as HG Data Insights and SpamHaus), as well as a deep database of historical cyber risk data (7 years), and proprietary information gathering across the entire global internet addresses. This ensures a deep pool of information for research, allowing for scores to be generated for companies and organizations worldwide. The continuous collection of data on all organizations ensures the ability to assess the long-term behavior of the subject organization from the moment the score is requested.
EVA
EVA data is typically derived from company filings, as well as ongoing event-driven data updates as reflected in public disclosure, press releases, and company websites. In addition, ISS subscribes to several critical, paid data services that are also factored into the EVA analysis.
What is the cost for your data offering?
Pricing for this solution is available upon request.
What are the key attributes that differentiate the data you offer?
ESG Corporate Rating
- Sector-specific and materiality-focused approach. our approach is sector-oriented; for each sector, a specific catalogue of indicators is selected, helping to ensure that the most material topics for each individual company are assessed.
- Forward-looking performance assessment. The ESG Corporate Rating applies a mid- to long-term approach to materiality, providing investors with forward-looking information on risks and opportunities of investments before they materialize.
- Granular and rule-based methodology. ISS ESG’s rating methodology follows clearly documented guidelines covering a rigorous data collection process and peer review, in addition to dialogue with rated issuers requesting feedback on all relevant information. Information provided by the issuer is reviewed, discussed with the company, and assessed according to strict evaluation rules.
- High level of detail and transparency. ISS ESG offers full transparency when it comes to sources of information and criteria weighting underlying the ESG Corporate Rating, including all collected data at the indicator level. Estimated data and disclosure ratios are available at a subcategory level.
ESG Country Rating
- Profound Rating Methodology. Our Country Rating framework includes more than 100 indicators holistically measuring performance against global best practices and material normative considerations. ISS ESG’s rating methodology follows clearly documented guidelines covering a rigorous data collection process and peer review.
- Broad Coverage. Our Country Rating provides a material assessment of the sustainability performance and risks of all EU, OECD, and BRICS countries as well as all major sovereign issuers from the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Oceania. It includes 830+ sovereign issuers, which is close to 100% of global sovereign debt issuance.
Sustainability Bond Rating
- Transparent Methodology: Bond-specific raw data is provided for complete transparency.
- Comprehensive Coverage: The holistic framework allows investors to access complete coverage across corporate, sovereign, and government-issued bonds and compare all labelled debt security types.
- Relevant Data: All data points that are assessed are client-driven and prioritize key use cases across all markets.
Governance QualityScore
- Presents at-a-glance governance rankings relative to index and region. Features company-level decile scores, presented as integers from 1 through 10, plus underlying category scores using the same scale that together provide a clear understanding of the drivers of a company’s governance risk. These scores provide an at-a-glance view of each company’s governance risk relative to their index and region. The individual factor breakdown takes a regional approach in evaluating and scoring companies, to allow for company-level comparisons within markets where corporate governance practices are similar.
E&S Disclosure QualityScore
- Focus on materiality. Highlights industry-relevant issues and aligns investors with leading market frameworks (TCFD, SASB). Key sustainable initiatives are universal, thematic, and materiality-focused. Quantitative and qualitative aspects of environmental and social disclosure practices are identified through a review of authoritative, investor-backed sustainability initiatives as well as recognised reporting standards and guidance.
ESG Muni QualityScore
- Assessing ESG performance at the municipal issuer level has gained momentum, as investors increasingly seek to manage ESG risks in fixed-income investments. In addition, municipal bonds can play a large role in shifting capital flows to investments that address societal issues and have a tangible impact on local communities. Through its ESG Muni QualityScore solution, we provide fixed-income investors with detailed and transparent ESG rankings, scores, and underlying data for municipal bonds in all 50 states.
Cyber Risk Score
- Concise, empirical, and proactive metric that seeks to convey how well a company manages and maintains its cybersecurity posture, powered by a machine learning model trained to identify the potential for a breach event over the next 12 months.
- Understanding cyber risk accumulation/aggregation based on defined segments and scenarios, and measuring risk exposure associated with third and fourth party dependencies (Cloud Service Provider and Technology Vendors)
Estimating Probable Maximum Loss scenarios and Disaster Scenarios based on defined requirements
SDG Solutions
- Holistic impact assessment. The SDG Impact Rating measures a company’s impact on the SDGs based on three pillars: products and services; operational management; and involvement in and responsiveness to controversies. This is based on a holistic understanding of impact, acknowledging that companies can have both negative impacts and positive impacts in different SDGs.
- Fully aligned with the SDG framework. Ratings are provided for each of the 17 SDGs, as well as at an aggregate level. Breakdown of products and services, operational impacts, and controversies is also provided for each of the seventeen SDGs.
- A granular bottom-up methodology with comprehensive evaluation guidelines. For each individual sustainability objective, a qualitative analysis is conducted to determine whether a product or service category makes a significant or limited net impact towards attaining the objective.
- A thematic approach weighing both positive and obstructing impact. Our impact analysis allows for a nuanced assessment of the sustainability quality of products and services. A given product category’s positive impact on the achievement of one objective can be displayed at the same time as its obstructing impact on the achievement of another objective.
EVA Financial Data
- Superior to traditional measures of profit: EVA cuts through accounting distortions and charges for the use of capital
- Style agnostic: Provides an unbiased view of quality, value, and growth investment opportunities
- Leading indicators: EVA metrics could provide information that may lead to future stock prices
- Consistent, transparent framework: EVA is comparable across companies, industries, and countries
Most recent significant update:
Q2 2025
- Sustainabilty Bond Rating launch
In April 2025, we launched our new Sustainability Bond Rating solution to provide investors with a sustainability impact and risk assessment at the issuance level for bonds labeled as green, social, or sustainability, along with sustainability-linked (GSSS+) bonds, issued by both corporate and sovereign entities. The new rating supports a multitude of investor use cases, ranging from risk management-related reviews, such as verifying labeled bonds’ external framework certification or SPOs, through to helping investors fulfill reporting requirements such as EU Taxonomy alignment of securities in a portfolio or fund.
Q4 2024
- Governance QualityScore Methodology Update
Enhancements include:
-
- New Information Security Factors based on new SEC rules that align with investor focus.
- Expansion of Factors: increase the global applicability of existing factors.
- Add Taiwan to GQS Universe: expanding our Emerging Market footprint by including one of the most highly client-requested markets into the GQS universe.
Q3 2024
- ESG Fund Rating Coverage enhancement
In September 2024, we updated fund rating preprocessing to use new fund holdings information that recursively explores and aggregates fund-of-fund holdings information. As a result, the coverage universe for ESG Fund Ratings has expanded to 45,000.
- ESG Fund Rating - addition of Biodiversity Factors
In July 2024, we enhanced the ESG Fund Rating solution to include 50 new factors covering the topic of biodiversity. These new factors are not yet available within the ESG Fund Rating Report.
- E&S Disclosure QualityScore Methodology Enhancement
Update of E&S QualityScore methodology, including the addition of more than 25 new factors, to keep the factor library up-to-date with regulatory developments and industry disclosure expectations.
Q2 2024
- Cyber Risk Solution Enhancement
In June 2024, we released enhancements to our Cyber Risk Solution, including an issuer-level report that offers a comprehensive evaluation of a company's technical cyber risk assessment (including 25 cyber risk evaluation factors) as well as a disclosure-based assessment of cyber governance and management. The initial coverage is Russell 3000 and TSX 60, and the plan is to expand the coverage to other key global indices to ensure worldwide coverage of our cyber risk assessments.
Planned future enhancements:
Areas of focus for 2025 include:
- Corporate Rating: Enhance existing Governance assessment by integrating the Governance QualityScore into the Corporate Rating
- Governance QualityScore: Expand global coverage and factor applicability reflecting a changing governance landscape
- Coverage expansion: Our continued coverage expansion will focus on harmonizing across our suite of solutions, with a particular focus on the Emerging Markets, among others.
What trends are you seeing in terms of customer demand?
Sustainability ratings and scores remain a principal research input for investors needing quick and easy-to-implement solutions to address sustainable investment needs. For those investors deepening their sustainable investment efforts, ratings and scores are being used increasingly as the launching point of proprietary in-house analysis and commonly serve as a benchmark from which proprietary methodologies are then overlayed. At many of these firms, demand for solutions assessing double-materiality persists with emerging topics, like Cyber Risk and Deforestation, gaining traction.
Demand for bond-level data, specifically in the labeled debt space, is growing, driven by global issuance of labeled debt surpassing USD 1T for the fourth consecutive year in 2024. The sophistication of these instruments is driving the need for instrument and framework-level information to supplement issuer-level data.
Contacts
Till Jung
Global Head of Sustainability Business, ISS STOXX
[email protected]
+49.89.46.2248162
