The Conference Board Launches ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform

For public companies working to stay ahead of the curve on Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) matters, the stakes have never been higher, or the spotlight brighter. Yet timely, relevant, and reliable data in these areas have remained limited, fragmentary, and costly—until now.

Today, The Conference Board fills the gap with the introduction of the ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform, Powered by ESGAUGE, the most comprehensive, powerful, and reliable benchmarking tool in the marketplace. 

A full suite of custom benchmarking tools for public companies

This online platform will allow subscriber US public companies to benchmark themselves against peer groups in five areas: executive compensation, director compensation, board practices, CEO succession, and shareholder voting. 

Subscribers can specify groups of peer companies to track, then expand this circle of competitive intelligence to peers of peers, reverse peers, and beyond. With such broad scope, and with direct links to disclosures at the entire Russell 3000, companies can make decisions, and respond to requests regarding compensation and governance from directors, executives, investors, the media, and others with unprecedented speed, confidence, and control.            

The platform rests on comprehensive real-time databases that use ESGAUGE’s AI and data-mining techniques to compile information from thousands of disclosures encompassing the entire Russell 3000.

“Governance leaders have long relied on The Conference Board’s benchmarking research on corporate governance and compensation practices to make sense of where they stand in a fast-changing landscape,” said Matteo Tonello, Managing Director of ESG Research at The Conference Board. “The ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform, Powered by ESGAUGE, brings these resources to the next level. Subscribing companies are able to visualize online emerging trends in real-time and, in a few clicks, zero in on highly granular competitive analysis down to the level of individual directors, proxy votes, and CEO succession events.”

Rich data dashboards and reports open to the public

In addition to the ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform itself, The Conference Board will continue to release a series of accompanying reports and data dashboards that are free to access for journalists, analysts, and the interested public at large. Updated in real-time, the dashboards will enable users to drill down on hundreds of real-time data points on executive compensation, director compensation, board practices, CEO succession, and shareholder voting. They can then further segment this data by index, sector, and company size, and export dynamically generated charts and tables.

"ESGAUGE is honored to be the data source behind The Conference Board’s ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform," said Paul Hodgson, Senior Adviser at ESG data analytics firm ESGAUGE. "We are rightly proud of the depth and quality of our data, on everything from hard-to-locate governance practices to CEO pay, and it is a confirmation of that to have been chosen to power TCB’s newest product. We look forward to rolling out the various data sets and finding interesting things to say about it all."

The Conference Board is launching the ESG Advantage Benchmarking Platform in stages, with online benchmarking tools covering executive compensation and director compensation available now, to be followed by tools for board practices, shareholder voting, and CEO succession in the coming months, in time for companies to prepare for the 2021 proxy season. For the public, The Conference Board has released its report and data dashboard on Director Compensation, with reports and dashboards planned in the other four areas during 2020.