Reading a Vendor-Hosted Analyst Report: Verdantix’s Green Quadrant on MSCI

A Report Worth Reading With One Caveat

The report is titled “Green Quadrant: Climate Financial Data And Analytics Providers” (September 2024), authored by Emma Cutler and Gus Brewer of Verdantix, an independent research and advisory firm. Verdantix’s own disclaimer states that “as an independent analyst firm, Verdantix does not endorse any vendor, product or service covered in our research publications.”

The caveat: the version of the PDF hosted at msci.com carries this note on its cover page: “This version of the report contains Verdantix’s summary of MSCI’s offerings to help prospective customers evaluate whether the vendor is a good fit for their requirements. It does not contain other vendor profiles.” MSCI is distributing a single-vendor excerpt of a report that evaluated ten companies, and MSCI, not Verdantix, chose which excerpt to publish. So while the underlying research is independent, this excerpt can’t be read as a neutral comparison of MSCI against the other nine vendors it was benchmarked against.

What the Report Actually Says

To be fair to both Verdantix and MSCI, the substance of what’s in this excerpt is not simple flattery. According to Verdantix’s Green Quadrant methodology — a 50-point vendor questionnaire, live product demonstrations, and 15 buyer interviews, applied to 10 vendors including Bloomberg, LSEG, S&P Global, Moody’s, and Clarity AI, alongside MSCI — MSCI is named as one of four vendors in the “Leaders’ Quadrant,” alongside Bloomberg, LSEG, and S&P Global, scoring above average on most of Verdantix’s 11 capability categories. The analyst commentary is not uncritical: it notes that MSCI has “limited supply chain capabilities,” that some buyers still perceive MSCI primarily as an ESG ratings provider rather than a climate data specialist, and that customers report slow removal of expired data and multi-week response times for technical questions.

What’s Useful Here, Independent of Any Vendor’s Score

The most useful part of this document has nothing to do with MSCI’s specific ranking. Verdantix’s 11 capability criteria for climate financial data and analytics vendors amount to a detailed, structured checklist of what “good” looks like in this market, and several of the specific questions asked of vendors go straight to the core data quality issues:

“Is documentation or source code available to users? How do you validate your models? Are your models reviewed externally? Have you published your models in scientific journals?” — asked identically for physical risk, transition risk, and biodiversity/nature capabilities.
“How do you deal with data gaps? How do you assure the quality of input data?”
“What climate scenarios are included in your physical risk analyses?”

The report itself notes, in its narrative discussion of the broader market (not specific to MSCI), that vendor claims of “science-based” methodology “could be strengthened if the models underwent more extensive external review,” and that “most vendors rely only on user feedback or internal reviewers” rather than independent peer review or regulatory scrutiny — a observation that lines up closely with what the ILN, GARP, and UNEP FI studies find directly through their own portfolio comparisons.

A Caveat Worth Repeating

We’re not endorsing MSCI’s ranking here, and we haven’t independently verified Verdantix’s underlying scoring. We also haven’t reviewed the other nine vendor profiles: as far as we’ve found, the full Green Quadrant report is a paid Verdantix subscription product, and this excerpt is the only version publicly available. We’re referencing it because the evaluation criteria are a genuinely useful lens on what data quality and transparency look like in this market, not as evidence of how MSCI compares to Bloomberg, LSEG, S&P Global, or the other vendors it was benchmarked against.

Conclusion

“Independent analyst research” and “material we can independently evaluate” aren’t the same thing once distribution passes through the hands of the company being evaluated. The Verdantix methodology behind this report is a useful checklist for what good climate data and analytics capability looks like; MSCI’s specific score in it is not something we can verify or vouch for.

Access the Source Material

Cutler, E., & Brewer, G., with Skinner, R. (2024, September). Green Quadrant: Climate Financial Data And Analytics Providers — MSCI overview excerpt. Verdantix, as republished by MSCI.