Apex Group, a global financial services provider, has announced a collaboration with BlackRock’s eFront to provide the General Partner (GP) community with ESG data consulting services. 

Peter Hughes, Founder and CEO, Apex Group: “We are excited to be collaborating with eFront to bring holistic, end-to-end ESG data collection and analysis capabilities to the private markets. With Apex Group’s consulting services, GPs will have additional resources at their disposal to help meet their ESG reporting needs from collection through to reporting.”

The partnership will provide GPs with a combination of Apex Group services and eFront’s technology to feed ESG data into eFront’s ESG Outreach solution, launched in 2021 and designed to help private market investors simplify and create standards for ESG reporting through a universal framework for data collection.

Apex Group’s proprietary ESG platform was launched in 2019 to provide technology, guidance and resources for private markets participants to quantify and improve their ESG performance.

The platform is supported by a team of ESG analysts to guide companies, independently verify their data, and advise on ESG performance improvements to mitigate risks and identify opportunities.

Investment professionals in alternative asset classes have a growing need to access ESG data to help identify risk and opportunities.

However, GP’s looking to incorporate ESG factors face challenges obtaining complex ESG metrics from portfolio companies.  Apex Group’s award winning ESG Rating, Reporting and Advisory Services will offer individual GPs and portfolio companies support to collect, calculate and improve the quantifiable ESG metrics that eFront’s ESG Outreach offering looks to source through eFront’s widely supported ESG reporting framework and data acquisition technology. 

Through the combination of Apex Group’s services, and the fulfilment of data into eFront’s ESG Outreach platform, the partnership will help bolster the creation of a private market benchmark for ESG metrics, and ultimately help further the standardization of ESG data for private markets.

Melissa Ferraz, Head of eFront Insight: “Working with Apex Group, we are excited to continue to lower the barriers that exist in private markets ESG reporting. We have seen strong adoption of ESG Outreach, and the collaboration with Apex Group will only further accelerate our shared goal to streamline and standardize ESG data for private markets.”