The Coalition has pledged to give young Australians access to up to $50,000 in their retirement savings to get a toehold in the housing market. Super funds say it will only further inflate property prices.
Listed property, which found investor favour in 2024, is better positioned to weather market volatility with institutions eyeing improving valuations and development opportunities. For overseas players, a weaker Australian dollar is a bonus.
… as Citi adds ESG scores to asset servicing platform
Citi has incorporated ESG scores into its global securities services data platform, Citi Velocity Clarity, allowing clients to analyse the sustainability exposure of their holdings at the portfolio and security level. It’s unique to Citi and proving popular with clients.
The new capability, which Citi believes is unique among major asset servicing providers, is proving popular with clients, the firm said in a statement last week (April 8).
It has followed a recently announced upgrade to the platform, including enhancements to the universe of available data, bespoke reporting capabilities and API (application programming interface) functionality.
Martin Carpenter, Citi Australia’s head of securities services, said: “Understanding ESG exposure is critical for clients and the scale and breadth of services is only expected to increase. As a fund administrator, we have full access to client’s holdings and hence well positioned to provide them with a platform to meet their reporting needs.
“Using the ESG solution, Citi clients can not only see the data, but can also interact with the data and drill down into specific country or sector exposure. They can download the data for further analysis or feed them into their internal reporting.”
Swaminath Nagarajan, Citi’s Sydney-based head of investment analytics for Asia Pacific, said: “As new guidelines and taxonomies are issued around the world and new regulations like modern-day slavery come into effect, investors need more than the traditional data sets they have today.
“They need to look deeper into their portfolios and understand exposure to various factors such as human rights, labour rights, diversity and emissions. Such information is useful across the front, middle and backoffice of client organisations as awareness of ESG and climate risk permeates all parts of the investment process.”
Citi has developed new visualisation tools to analyse multiple sustainability measures provided on a daily basis by Arabesque S-Ray, a global data provider that uses an algorithmic methodology to measure ESG performance.
Citi also recently announced the launch of its Citi ESG World Indices, comprised of best-in-class ESG performers from across the global markets, based on Arabesque’s ratings. Citi plans to incorporate additional ESG data from other providers in future developments.
