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Impact

Working page — investment-manager angle for ESG Screening. Standing reference, top-level alongside Architecture / Glossary / Decisions / Backlog.

Purpose

This page tracks a distinct line of work from the core screening tool: whether/how ESG Screening's data and scoring could support acting as an investment manager — selecting individual securities as part of an overall investment thesis, rather than only screening a fixed universe of held/watched companies after the fact.

This is exploratory. Nothing here implies a decision has been made to build or launch anything. The page exists so the thinking has one place to live instead of getting scattered across chat sessions.

Naming note — Phase (this page) vs. Stage (production)

"Stage 1" and "Stage 2" already mean something specific in the live system — Stage 1 is the per-company ESG score (all GICS sectors), Stage 2 is the FI-only ESG+credit+returns triangulation. Those terms are baked into the DB, scoring code, ADRs, and every run digest.

This page uses Phase 1–9 for the investment-manager build-out to avoid collision. Where a phase reuses existing production concepts, that's called out explicitly below rather than renumbering the production terms.

The nine phases

(sequence as first framed — not yet validated as the right order or the right scope per phase)

  1. Overarching risk profile. Not a single high/medium/low label — a portfolio-level segmentation along a time axis. E.g. Year 1: 50% high / 30% medium / 20% low risk, evolving by year.
  2. Thematic scope. Which areas of impact investing are in view. Negative screens already exist (weapons, O&G) but positive screens don't yet (education, sanitation in developing markets, etc.) — these need building out.
  3. Asset-class scope. Which asset classes are in vs. out (e.g. government bonds in, private equity out). Needs a coherent inventory of available asset classes as the starting point, not just a yes/no per class.
  4. Target portfolio construction. Combine Phases 1+2+3 into an actual target portfolio shape.
  5. Individual security ESG selection (= existing Stage 1, extended). Red-list exclusions (e.g. weapons) plus a rating for everything else. Needs significant expansion beyond the current Brewin Dolphin cohort to cover non-equity securities — bonds, REITs, etc.
  6. Return-potential assessment (= existing Stage 2, extended). Alongside ESG, understand return potential per security. Range differs by asset class — equities span roughly 100% loss to 1000%+ upside; bonds have a theoretically similar shape but a much narrower real-world range.
  7. Regulatory position. Whether this sits under Tomindoo or under MG, and what that implies for FCA regulation, insurance, and related obligations. Placed ahead of Operating model — the regulatory answer can constrain broker/custodian choice, not the other way round.
  8. Operating model. Brokers, custodians — who actually executes and holds this.
  9. Monitoring & governance framework. Ongoing monitoring of overall and individual risk, ESG/impact, and returns.

Open questions

(unordered — not yet prioritised)

  • Sequencing: is 1→9 (as ordered above) the right build order, or do other phases need to run in parallel rather than strictly sequentially?
  • Phase 5's universe expansion (equities → bonds, REITs, etc.) — does the existing scraper/rule architecture generalise, or does non-equity ESG data require materially different sourcing?
  • Phase 2's positive screens — same rule-engine mechanism as the existing negative screens, or a different kind of assessment entirely?
  • Is this exercise research-only for now, or explicitly aimed at a client-facing product/strategy?
  • Data/build implications are out of scope for this page until phases are further defined — no scraper, schema, or scoring work should start from this page alone.

Working log — entries (reverse chronological)

2026-07-19 — regulatory position reordered ahead of operating model (chat session)

Confirmed: Regulatory position (originally framed as Phase 9) moves ahead of Operating model (originally Phase 7) — the regulatory answer (Tomindoo vs. MG, FCA scope) can constrain broker/custodian choice, so it shouldn't be settled last. Phase list above reflects the new order (7=Regulatory, 8=Operating model, 9=Monitoring & governance).

2026-07-19 — nine-phase framing established (chat session)

Rob laid out the nine-phase structure above as the shape of the investment-manager expansion. This supersedes the initial 2026-07-19 framing entry (kept below for the record). Existing Stage 1/Stage 2 production concepts map into Phases 5 and 6 respectively, extended in scope; Phases 1–4 and 7–9 are net-new thinking with no prior work behind them yet.

2026-07-19 — first framing (chat session, superseded same day)

Initial capture, since narrowed by the nine-phase framing above. Kept for continuity: Rob wants to explore ESG Screening's tooling supporting an investment-manager function, using ESG-compliance data already produced, rather than only screening a pre-existing holdings list.

Decisions

(none yet — decisions arising from this thread should also get an ADR per the usual pattern, and be cross-referenced here)

Status

Exploratory / early framing. Nine phases identified, none yet scoped in detail. Not blocking anything on the current backlog. No build implications yet.