The Loan Market Association (LMA), the Loan Syndications and Trading Association (LSTA) and the European Leveraged Finance Association (ELFA) have published an ESG questionnaire which they hope will be an industry standard for investors undertaking ESG due diligence on prospective and incumbent asset managers.
The publishing associations hope that this will simplify the due diligence process by avoiding varied and often duplicative information requests.
There is of course a potential upside for investors too, as they are more likely to receive comparable data across asset managers which ought to make ESG analysis far more straightforward.
Whether this questionnaire will become industry standard will be largely dependent on whether investors are willing to accept it, and whether legal or regulatory requirements on investors will permit them to accept it. However, even if investors continue to have specific diligence requirements outside of the questionnaire, it would still streamline the process if this questionnaire were to form the basis of ESG due diligence going forward.