V-Square’s Sarr On Delivering Customized, High-Impact ESG Solutions

Mamadou-Abou Sarr, President & CEO, V-Square Quantitative Management, discusses his investment platform, which is designed to deliver customized, high-impact ESG solutions.

In the last few years, ESG has evolved from a niche category, to a more mainstream investment option. This surge of broad-based ESG investment options, coupled with increased interest in values-based investing, has driven the need for more tailored ESG portfolio solutions. V-Square Quantitative Management responds to this need by creating customized, passive portfolios, which are part of investors’ core allocation.

A partnership with V-Square Quantitative Management starts with a value-based questionnaire, which allows advisors to deliver customized beta solutions that are client-centric. The value-based questionnaire covers what type of screens the client is eager to follow and what type of goals they’re hoping to achieve, all while linking back to the causes they care about. “It’s important to have a tool that allows clients to go deeper into what they care about and match that with the right solution that has performance in mind, but also meets their goals ultimately,” says Sarr.

V-Square Quantitative Management also uses their own proprietary ESG score, called the Square Score, which is uniquely linked with financial performance. Other score methodologies give information based on an ESG disclosure and breach of regulations, and have no relation to financial valuation.

“Even though ESG information was complementary, I felt that there was often a missing link back to financials, so a good ESG company could be a good investment from a portfolio standpoint,” says Sarr.

The Square Score accomplishes this financial valuation using multi-value strategies like value and momentum. What matters to V-Square Quantitative Management is identifying the leaders and laggers from a financial and ESG standpoint. They score on a company level, based on how well the company’s doing on management on ESG issues and exposures of ESG risks. Clients access these tools through V-Square’s Managed Account Platform (V-Square Map). Upon joining the platform, advisors are able to recommend strategies and manage accounts hosted on the V-Square platform.

V-Square Quantitative Management also has a platform called ESG Central, which compares ESGs of all companies in one single interface, making it easy to observe how the scores are interlinked or not. There’s an added module of proxy voting trends, so ESG scores and proxy voting trends across the board are accessible. This tool facilitates and authorizes use of ESG scores by asset owners, asset managers, and companies.

Mamadou-Abou Sarr is the Co-Founder, President and Chief Executive Officer of V-Square Quantitative Management, a subsidiary of Valor Management L.P. Mamadou founded V-Square Quantitative Management. Sarr founded V-Square Quantitative Management in 2020 after an accomplished career in asset management whilst working for global financial services companies across the U.S., Europe, Middle East, and Africa. His investment firm specializes in financial engineering, development and management of quantitative portfolios and processing of sustainability big data. Sarr’s previous role was global head of product development and sustainable investing at Northern Trust Asset Management in Chicago, where he was responsible for driving innovation and product development across asset classes. Mamadou spearheaded, developed, and led one of the largest sustainable investing platforms in the industry.

Additional Resources:

V-Square Quantitative Management Website

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