Nordea is the first client to sign up to the Nasdaq ESG Footprint as the US exchange group looks to expand its provision of data outside its traditional market data offering in Europe.

James McKeone, head of European data at Nasdaq, told Markets Media that Nordea will white label the Nasdaq ESG Footprint to provide a dashboard which will allow the bank’s clients to track the environmental, social, and governance impact of both their portfolios and individual securities based on specified parameters such as water usage or greenhouse emissions.

Anders Langworth, head of sustainable finance at Nordea, said in a statement: “We believe the sustainability footprint overview will help our customers to better understand what sustainability means in relation to investments, so that the importance of making sustainable choices becomes more evident. The collaboration with Nasdaq is an important milestone in the continuous work on being more transparent and better in explaining the connection between sustainability and investments.”

.@Nasdaq’s new ESG initiative will provide investors with a global sustainability footprint of their portfolios. @Nordea will be the first bank to provide the service to their clients.

Learn more here: https://t.co/DFEUqQXXil pic.twitter.com/88XRehaluV

— Nasdaq (@Nasdaq) May 14, 2020

McKeone continued that ESG Footprint is flexible so some potential clients are interested using the data in a mobile app. “Another potential customer is interested in a dashboard on gender equality and the numbers of women in senior positions in a company,” he said.

He explained that the ESG Footprint has been developed in partnership with Matter, a Danish fintech, and uses data from more than 60 sources including public company reporting and information from non-governmental organisations.

“It is a unique database,” McKeone added. “A differentiator is that we do not just provide an ESG score but allow investors to see how a company or a portfolio performs against specific ESG criteria, such as emissions.”

McKeone said Nasdaq is looking to develop the ESG Footprint so it measures compliance with the new sustainable finance taxonomy proposed by the European Union.

“We have a goal of 20 clients globally by the end of this year as there is also interest in Asia and the US,” he added.

Another product from Nasdaq involving environmental, social, and governance data is the ESG Portal which allows more than 400 Nasdaq-listed companies to report. The exchange has a team of people who guide companies on reporting, such as how they should report carbon dioxide emissions, and they also validate the data.

European data strategy

McKeone told Markets Media in October last year that Nasdaq is aiming for more than 30% of its European data business to come from outside its traditional market data offerings.

Outside ESG, Nasdaq launched a partnership last year with the LBMA, the  trade association for the wholesale over-the-counter market for gold and silver bullion, to increase transparency in the OTC precious metals market.

The LBMA-i service was expanded to include daily market information on platinum and palladium, from gold and silver. LBMA-i is an online offering that collates anonymous and aggregated trade volumes reporting data from LBMA members and began as a joint effort between LBMA and software provider Cinnober which Nasdaq acquired last year.

LBMA-i's- precious metals datasets are now available via #BloombergTerminal and market data feed (B-PIPE), providing comprehensive coverage of the OTC precious metals market.

Learn more about @Nasdaq's partnership with @lbmaexecutive and @TheTerminal: https://t.co/SunMzvBNaB pic.twitter.com/cQ4ri2eAKm

— Nasdaq (@Nasdaq) May 12, 2020

This month LBMA-i precious metals data provided by Nasdaq became available on the Bloomberg Terminal and market data feed.