Great Start for ET Index Investment

ET Index, who help investors identify, understand and reduce their exposure to carbon risk, has already raised more than £800,000 on crowdfunding site SyndicateRoom.  ET Index opened a £1.1 million investment round on the crowdfunding site last Friday and has already hit over 70 per cent of its target. SyndicateRoom is unique because it allows members to invest alongside “business angels”.

Governments around the world are increasingly prioritising green energy, with more and more legislation and taxation being levied against companies with the aim of reducing emissions. ET Index helps investors understand the nuanced investment risks related to this and the carbon footprint of companies, before they invest.

While some data is currently available on the carbon footprint of companies, this is nowhere near exhaustive. ET Index fills this information gap by giving institutional investors high-level insights into how companies are performing in this area, thus helping safeguard their portfolios against upcoming green legislation and the associated (and often invisible) costs.

Specifically, ET Index gives investors: detailed corporate carbon emissions data, a portfolio of carbon footprinting and reporting services, bespoke portfolio analysis of exposure to carbon risk and low-carbon indexes to enable better investment management.

The ET Index series is the only low-carbon and fossil-free index option on the market to be linked to a public, fully transparent carbon ranking of all of the companies within each index. This gives investors the assurance that they’re putting more money into the low-carbon companies and less money into the high-carbon ones.

Underpinned by public, transparent ET Carbon Rankings, each ET Index also acts as an engagement tool to encourage constituent companies to lower emissions.

Operating on a licensing and subscription-based model, ET Index is already generating revenue, having recently performed a pilot portfolio carbon footprint analysis for CalSTRs, one of the largest pension funds in the US.

Sam Gill, CEO of ET Index said: “Climate change is the challenge of my generation. I want to empower others to tackle the problem. Since indexes are a pooled investment vehicle where money is moving in unison, and around one-third of the world’s money is invested through indexes, if this money could be redirected according to a company’s environmental impact, then this could be a very powerful tool to shift company behaviour.

“I also want to honour my late father’s legacy. My father, Michael Gill, wrote a visionary book called Environmental Tracking back in 1997 – which I updated in 2011 as Environmental Tracking 3.0 – outlining the broad concept upon which ET Index is based today. Following a career in the city as an analyst and, briefly, a fund manager, he could see the potential for index funds as a force for good.

“Success for ET Index will be increasing the incentive for companies to lower emissions. The only way to maximise that incentive is to maximise the size of assets following the indexes, which in turn will increase profitability for ET Index as a business and return value to our shareholders.”

ET Index’s lead investor is a German Family Office which invested £390,000. ET Index’s equity crowdfunding round ends on June 3. Learn more about ET Index here.