How has NorthPeak Advisory's ESG strategy evolved since its founding in 2020?
NorthPeak Advisory was founded in 2019, at the birth of the ESG boom, when sustainability became a critical focus for many businesses. We identified a gap in the market, particularly as asset managers struggled to align with emerging regulations and investor demands regarding ESG integration. Our initial efforts focused heavily on education and training, helping clients meet basic ESG requirements. Over time, our services have evolved to offer more comprehensive support, expanding our client base globally. We now work with a wide array of sectors and industries supporting asset managers, and corporates, providing solutions that address ESG data management and value creation across business areas.
As businesses have matured in their understanding of ESG, our role has shifted from offering light-touch policy advice to a more strategic partnership. We guide clients in embedding ESG factors into their core operations, ensuring they derive true alpha while taking relevant risks into account. The key to our success is creating tailored roadmaps for each client, making sure ESG strategies are integrated not just for compliance but for enhancing long-term business resilience. We pride ourselves on partnering with clients, not dictating, and fostering internal buy-in to ensure sustainable progress.
Could you elaborate on your recent partnership with Worldfavor and its role in driving sustainable finance?
Our collaboration with Worldfavor is a great example of how partnerships are at the heart of sustainability efforts. Worldfavor brings significant expertise in supply chain management, particularly around ESG data, allowing us to offer robust monitoring and analysis tools for our clients. These partnerships allow us to provide holistic solutions, ensuring that ESG strategies are not just theoretical but implementable, measurable, and adaptable.
We believe that no single organization can solve the vast challenges of climate change and sustainability in isolation.
That’s why we partner with experts in different areas of ESG, such as GHG emissions or human rights. Each partner brings unique insights and tools that help us provide a complete picture for our clients, whether it's through ongoing education or direct application to their business challenges. This collaborative approach allows us to push the agenda forward and continue evolving the market's understanding of ESG.
How does your collaboration help asset managers and corporations meet their sustainability goals?
Asset managers and corporates often face the challenge of sifting through vast amounts of ESG data to find what’s relevant to their business. We help them by not only providing data and insights but also helping them understand what is integral for their specific sector or investment strategy. This is crucial as regulations, like the EU’s SFDR, increasingly demand transparency and accountability from these businesses and CSRD, that requires companies to provide the best data they can in order to report. Our approach is to take this complex information and distill it into actionable insights that align with their long-term sustainability goals.
This process is more than ticking boxes for regulatory compliance. It’s about building a framework that can adapt and evolve as the company grows. Whether through reporting or deeper integration of ESG factors, our goal is to help clients move beyond superficial efforts. We encourage them to be forward-thinking, making sustainability a core part of their business model rather than just an annual report requirement.
What are the main challenges asset managers face in ESG reporting, and how do you help them overcome these?
One of the biggest challenges we see is the need for asset managers to align with regulatory frameworks while maintaining transparency and accountability. We always emphasize the importance of walking the talk and talking the walk—being realistic in commitments and not overpromising. Many companies fall into the trap of either greenwashing or greenhushing, where they either exaggerate their sustainability achievements or avoid communicating them altogether to escape scrutiny. We help our clients navigate this by creating step-by-step roadmaps that align their ESG commitments with business capabilities.
This approach ensures that clients set achievable targets and have the data systems in place to track their progress. It's about being mindful and realistic in ESG commitments, taking one step at a time while staying aligned with both internal business objectives and external regulatory requirements. By doing this, we help clients build a transparent, accountable ESG strategy that evolves alongside industry changes.
How does NorthPeak help businesses embed long-term sustainability into their business models?
We leverage our expertise as market practitioners to speak the language of our clients, which makes embedding sustainability more seamless. Our advantage comes from understanding the asset classes our clients invest in and the regulations they must adhere to, allowing us to create tailored solutions for each client. We focus on setting up the right reporting and data collection systems, which are essential for long-term success in sustainability.
Starting with the essentials and gradually improving standards ensures that businesses don’t get overwhelmed by unnecessary data collection. This approach allows us to provide solutions that are affordable, accessible, and repeatable, ensuring clients are not wasting time or resources on irrelevant metrics. Our aim is to help them track their sustainability evolution and align it with realistic business objectives.
How does NorthPeak transform sustainability data into commercial value for clients?
We work with clients to identify the metrics most relevant to their portfolio or business and how they are best weighted. However, no metric can be viewed in isolation. Biodiversity, for instance, plays a critical role in everything from supply chain management to a company’s direct operations, including the environmental footprint of its facilities, offices, and production sites.
Our proprietary framework for measuring biodiversity enables us to detect significant environmental changes across both the company and its supply chain, changes which could be driven by various factors, such as land use, water consumption, waste management, or other key considerations. Our role is to ensure that the data clients collect is not only accurate but commercially valuable. We collaborate with best-in-class data and solution providers to ensure that the metrics used are aligned with the client's industry and regulatory needs.
Moreover, we help clients move from proxy data to real data, providing tools to track their progress over time. This allows businesses to see tangible improvements and demonstrate ESG integration to investors. In the long run, robust ESG performance can enhance a company's valuation, particularly when they seek further funding or acquisition opportunities.
Do you have any success stories where NorthPeak significantly improved a client's sustainability performance?
We’ve seen particular success with our private credit managers, especially in guiding their portfolio companies from pre-investment to post-investment stages. By serving as a third-party intermediary, we help these companies understand what information they need to provide, from GHG emissions to employee data. Our involvement often encourages them to open up about challenges and gain a clearer understanding of why these efforts matter and end value creation
The results speak for themselves. Companies with well-integrated ESG data and strategies tend to secure higher valuations when seeking additional funding or being sold to private equity. The more transparent and robust their sustainability efforts, the greater the financial benefits down the line.
How does NorthPeak ensure its own operations are sustainable?
At NorthPeak, we believe in practicing what we preach. Internally, we track our GHG emissions and publish our own sustainability report, ensuring that we hold ourselves accountable in the same way we expect our clients to. Beyond environmental metrics, we also focus on staff well-being, offering unlimited holidays and fully paid parental leave. We understand that sustainability isn’t just about environmental impact but also about fostering a positive internal culture.
We also ensure that our growth is sustainable, both for the business and our employees. By providing opportunities for career development and financial support, we create an environment where staff are motivated and aligned with our broader sustainability goals.
