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Morningstar Sustainalytics is an ESG (environmental, social and governance) research, ratings and data provider. Its flagship product, the ESG Risk Ratings, scores how exposed a company is to industry-specific material ESG risks and how well it manages that exposure, producing a rating on a five-level severity scale (negligible, low, medium, high, severe) built from more than 200 indicators and 1,800-plus underlying data points across over 20 material ESG issues. The firm also publishes controversies research, carbon and climate transition data, product-involvement screens, country risk ratings, EU regulatory datasets covering SFDR, the EU Taxonomy and CSRD, and second-party opinions (SPOs) on green, social and sustainability bond frameworks. Its methodology rests on a two-dimensional framework that separates a company's total exposure to ESG risk from how much of that risk is actually managed, which the firm markets as an absolute measure supporting cross-industry comparison rather than only best-in-class peer scoring. Coverage runs to more than 16,000 companies across public equity, fixed income and private markets, drawn from a research team the firm describes as 800-plus ESG analysts, with AI-assisted news monitoring layered on top of analyst judgment. Clients are institutional investors, asset and wealth managers, banks, index providers and corporations that use the ratings and underlying data for investment screening, stewardship, compliance and disclosure workflows, including via direct data feeds and APIs. The company traces to 1992, when Michael Jantzi founded Toronto-based Jantzi Research; that firm merged with a European sustainability research counterpart to form Sustainalytics, which later absorbed Germany's Scoris and Australia's AIS, then acquired GES International in 2019, taking headcount past 600 across 17 offices. Morningstar, Inc. bought an initial 40 percent stake in 2017 and agreed in April 2020 to buy the remaining roughly 60 percent, a deal that closed on July 2, 2020 for an initial cash payment of around 55 million euros plus earnouts tied to 2020 and 2021 revenue; Sustainalytics has operated as Morningstar's wholly owned ESG division since. The firm is credited with flagging governance weaknesses at Volkswagen months before its 2015 emissions scandal, and at Fiat around 18 months before its own diesel violations surfaced, and it built the Jantzi Social Index in 2000 and the UN-linked Global Compact 100 index. As of 2026 Morningstar Sustainalytics sits within Morningstar's combined Sustainalytics and Indexes group under president Ron Bundy, and continues to publish periodic research such as an Asset Owner Perspectives survey and reports on corporate net zero credibility; it won Waterstechnology's Buy-Side Technology award and an Environmental Finance Impact award in 2025.
