Negative Screening

The start of the SRI industry is often seen as beginning in the 1700s when the religious group the Quakers refused to allow their members to be involved and invest in the slave trade. Over the hundreds of years since then, the idea of avoiding investing in companies that were not in alignment with certain ethical or religious criteria has been an important part of responsible investment.

Today, many investors, pension funds or endowments still use this approach as part of their fundamental charter (e.g. a religious charity) or in response to their members requests (e.g. pension funds divesting from cluster bomb manufacturers or due to world events such as the boycott of South African businesses in protest to Apartheid or recent divestment from companies involved in Darfur).

With the ASSET4 database, clients can easily find companies receive a material level of revenue from gambling or tobacco or pornography for example. It is also possible to use the screens to avoid the worst performing companies within a particular sector, who have a poor human rights record.  Due to the flexibility of the data, any combination of the over 250 KPIs can be used for defining screens.