Credit Suisse to launch their own social index

Hot off the news that M-Cril will be launching their own social capital exchange, as reported by Santhosh, and also the plans by Xigi.net to create a social capital index that I spoke about some time back, Credit Suisse plans to launch its own Social Responsibility Index. As reported by Microcapital.org:

Credit Suisse will launch in the coming weeks an index that encompasses social responsibility criteria in addition to strong valuation and performance characteristics. The index will be composed of stocks that rank highly on both social responsibility criteria and financial ratios, the latter being defined by HOLT, Credit Suisse’s proprietary financial analysis tool. The index will offer investors exposure to a portfolio of stocks that are screened for strong characteristics in terms of corporate performance, valuation and momentum using HOLT’s proprietary framework. Coupled with a well established method of identifying socially responsible companies, including assessing political, environmental, labor, and human rights issues, the approach used in the systematic screening process has shown in simulations to consistently identify stocks that collectively outperform the market.

This project is part of the bank’s larger push to focus on the social investing and BoP markets as evidenced by other initiatives taken by the company. The full story can be read here.