Axel Lomholt, Chief Product Officer for Indices & Benchmarks at Qontigo, explains how technology and data innovation are buoying thematic investing, and what it takes to be at the research frontline in thematic strategies.

Saumya Mehrotra from Qontigo’s Sustainable Investment team joined a panel of experts during the recent Sustainable Investment Forum North America in New York, to discuss how ESG data and applications are evolving. In her words, while sustainability information is becoming more specialized, so are investors’ approaches to it.

The Sustainable Development Investments Asset Owner Platform (SDI AOP) helps investors assess companies’ contributions to the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. With the latest enhancement to its dataset, investors can also imbed information around products and services that have a negative impact.

The offering breaks fresh ground in indexing and brings a smart and robust strategy to enhance structured products at a time when the implied dividends market has challenged the industry. The indices, which have been exclusively licensed to Citi, enable the structured-product issuer to remove any single-name dividend risk from their books and deliver more attractive product terms to clients and end investors.

PE’s latest Top 400 Asset Managers survey of the largest institutional money managers sheds light on the increasing popularity of index-based strategies: passively managed assets grew almost twice as fast as actively managed ones between 2013 and 2018.

STOXX has licensed the EURO iSTOXX 50 ESG Focus Index and the EURO iSTOXX 50 ESG Focus GR Decrement 5% Index to the British bank Barclays as underlyings for the issuance of structured products.

Whether it's optimizers of patient treatment or hybrid bio-chemical drugs, many health-care stocks are inventing the future.