Awards for Deutsche Bank and Long Finance at the Sustainable City Awards
Yesterday evening's Sustainable City Awards ceremony at Mansion House saw Deutsche Bank and Long Finance commended for their contributions to sustainable long term thinking in finance - winning the Farsight Award 2015/16 and the Insight Award, respectively. This year's awards ceremony was organised by the London Sustainability Exchange.
Supported by Gresham College, Z/Yen Group and Long Finance's London Accord, the Farsight Award honours the best individual piece of analysis by an investment research institution that integrates traditional financial analysis with longer-term environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues such as climate change, resource scarcity, corporate governance and human capital. It's criteria are originality; quality; readability and clarity; sophistication and depth; and financial usefulness.
The Farsight Award judges convened in January 2016 to discuss 38 investment research reports. All these reports are freely accessible from the London Accord section of the Long Finance website. They were extremely pleased by the high quality of the research submitted and by the wide range of ESG issues explored. After a lively discussion, the judges reached the following decision:
Winner of the Farsight Award 2015/16: Deutsche Bank for their report "The Logistics of Supply Chain Alpha".
Runner Up of the Farsight Award 2015/16: Barclays for their report"Climate Change: Warming Up For COP-21".
Melissa Brown, one of the judges, said: "The Logistics of Supply Chain Alpha represents an innovative approach to analysing the impact of supply chains and their structure on some of the most broadly held global equities. ESG-focused investors have long recognised the importance of supply chain relationships and this report offers investors valuable quantitative tools for thinking about how these may influence investment performance.
As a thought provoking, mindset challenging, contribution tackling fundamental tools rather than immediate investment challenges, the judges chose to highly commend Dr Nick Goddard's Long Finance report "Uses and Abuses of Discount Rates: A Primer For The Wary". In turn, the Sustainable City Awards judging panel presented Dr Goddard and Long Finance with this year's Insight Award.
After receiving the award, Dr Goddard offered a challenge to financial professionals globally:
"In the current backlash against the financial sector, it has often been justifiably accused of short-termism. It is ironic that this myopia should extend to discounted cash flow analysis, which by its nature focuses on a multi-year time horizon. The entire approach is in danger of being brought into disrepute, a great shame when appropriate discounting facilitates wise decisions on crucial national issues such as pension provision and infrastructure investment. As with so much else that Long Finance does, the paper on discount rates was aimed at highlighting the potential abuses of discounted cash flow models not in order to discredit them, but rather in order to elevate the sort of company they keep."
About the London Accord
The London Accord is a programme of Long Finance which acts as a nexus between the financial services industry and society to engage on long-term thinking about ESG issues, cities, finance and policy. To date, over 60 contributors primarily from the financial services sector share their investment research with the London Accord. Over 500 reports are available online, thereby providing insights for investors, financial services professionals, policy-makers, entrepreneurs, innovators, NGOs and members of the public. If you would like to share your reports with the London Accord, please contact us.
Nine reports were shortlisted by the judging panel out of 38 reports considered.
For more information, please contact Michael Mainelli, Z/Yen Group Limited - michael_mainelli@zyen.com