Objective

To strengthen research coverage for the equity strategy division of a top-tier European investment bank by conceiving and launching a new thematic research/thought leadership offering analyzing the changing dynamics in the boardroom and senior executive teams from a point of view of diversity, and the corresponding impact it could potentially have on overall company performance.

CRISIL's Solution

• Created a new publication focused on corporate diversity to showcase the investment bank’s ability to provide differentiated and unique strategy research and products
  
• The CRISIL team liaised with 150+ global sell-side analysts of the bank to develop a database of more than 3,000 companies over two months. This database would not only represent the research universe for the study, but also form a separate revenue stream for the bank once the report was published
  
  • Data was not easily available in financial databases and had to be collected from individual company filings/websites
    
  • The CRISIL team also undertook the task of collecting data for over 700 companies that were not covered by the bank to further build up the universe
    
• Determined the gender composition of both the supervisory and management board of each company
  
• Devised methodology to create multiple custom sector/regional indices to generate performance and valuation metrics, which would help in supporting our hypothesis
  
• The team calculated sector-adjusted comparison of the different levels of diversity to show that greater diversity tends to correlate with better corporate performance
  
• The team also came up with a quantitative analysis to show how companies manipulate board composition to falsely showcase themselves as a “Gender Diverse”
  
• The CRISIL team played a pivotal role during the report publication process, including coordinating with the editing team, creating presentation packs for global press release as well as addressing all client queries post-publication

Client Impact

• Proprietary research offering based on difficult-to-access data and unique methodology appealed to clients and helped broaden the equity strategy division’s coverage base
  
• The client especially pleased with the accuracy and breadth of the database created
  
• CRISIL team cited as contributors to the report as a token of appreciation for their efforts
  

Questions

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