Inclusive Development International (IDI) and the Data Science Institute at the University of Chicago (DSI) have launched expanded versions of our free-to-use Shareholder Tracker and Development Bank Investment Tracker (DeBIT) tools, providing users with up-to-date information on the investments of a vast universe of financial actors that would otherwise be prohibitively expensive or time consuming to track down.
Join us on Tuesday, March 10 at 10am EST for a practical demonstration of what the new tools can do. Register here.
New Shareholder Tracker covers thousands of additional global investors
The new and improved Shareholder Tracker allows users to instantaneously search the shareholdings of 4,200 global investors, a more than 5,000 percent increase from the 80 included in the original version. While the initial version covered the world’s largest investment firms, scraping information from quarterly filings to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the new version covers every investor filing a 13F form to the SEC—that is, any investor with more than $100 million in assets under management that does business in the United States, including pension funds, socially responsible investors and impact-driven funds. The tool also directly scrapes the websites of 17 European pension funds that do not disclose to the SEC and have historically been responsive to engagement from human rights advocates.
“Shareholders are important targets in corporate accountability advocacy because they have leverage over companies that harm people and the planet, and a responsibility to use that leverage. The Shareholder Tracker brings them out of the shadows so that advocates can identify and engage them to effect change,” said Dustin Roasa, IDI’s senior research director.
Data in the Shareholder Tracker is now automatically refreshed on a quarterly basis (as soon as new 13Fs are filed with the SEC), giving users real-time insight into the shareholders of an estimated 17,500 publicly traded companies around the world that may be harming people and the planet. Advocates can also use the tool to access a comprehensive and searchable list of the current equity holdings of specific investors, allowing them to, among other things, assess how well those investors are upholding commitments to divest from specific companies or sectors—for example, fossil fuels. The tool has also been updated to allow users to sort investors according to the market value of their shareholdings in specific companies—meaning they can easily identify those actors with the most potential leverage. Users can also filter results by investor type (i.e., pension funds vs. institutional investors) and download search results, making shareholder research and engagement quicker and easier.
DeBIT tool provides easy access to real-time information on development bank investments
The DeBIT tool allows users to search investments made by 16 development finance institutions that have independent complaint mechanisms that are accessible to affected communities. DeBIT has been updated to streamline the user experience and ensure it reliably represents the most up-to-date information available. For researchers investigating a specific harmful project or company, DeBIT can quickly establish which, if any, of the 16 development banks are directly exposed to it. This would otherwise require users to search 16 separate websites for every company or project of interest. The tool is especially useful for people trying to uncover development bank connections to harmful projects through complex, multilayered business relationships such as financial intermediary lending, which can be time-consuming and difficult when done manually. Campaigners focused on influencing the policies of one development finance institution can also easily use the tool to get an overall picture of what that institution is financing, with numerous possibilities for sorting and filtering by project status, sector, country or year.
Democratizing access to financial information
The Shareholder Tracker and DeBIT tool updates are part of Inclusive Development International’s ongoing work to develop a suite of tools that gives community environmental and human rights advocates and other public interest researchers access to important financial data that is currently only available through paid subscription services—such as Bloomberg Terminal and LSEG Workspace—that are prohibitively expensive for most civil society organizations and public interest researchers.
As part of this work, Inclusive Development International, BankTrack and DSI will soon be launching a complementary tool allowing users to track commercial bank loans and bond underwriting. This Commercial Debt Tracker will help users quickly identify private-sector financial institutions that are exposed to a harmful project, expanding the universe of potential advocacy targets.
By automating key steps in investment and supply chain research, these tools—combined with our Follow the Money research support, in-depth trainings and do-it-yourself resources—play a central role in our efforts to grow a wider community of advocates who are employing these proven methods in their efforts to hold corporations and development institutions accountable for their harmful impacts on human rights and the environment.