Thèse CIFRE

ValueCo is a mission-driven company that aims to explicitly integrate environmental, social and human criteria into company performance and market valuations. We are developing the first SaaS solution to collect proprietary ESG ratings from investors and provide market analyses to asset managers, institutional investors, and corporates.

Our collaborative model and cutting-edge research make us the only player to collect and leverage asset managers' internal opinions. This model enables us to draw on the collective intelligence of responsible investors to improve market practices.

We are already working with over 40 banks and asset managers and launched our web platform in April 2023. We are closing our seed fundraising round to expand the team.

What's unique about ValueCo?

We are a highly committed team working with a wide range of actors to achieve a transition towards a more sustainable and ambitious approach to finance both in Europe and abroad.

We are laureates of the Fintech for Tomorrow Award 2023, a Finance Innovation Label Awardee, a signatory to the UN Principles for Responsible Investment, a member of The Good AI community and an alumnus of the Techstars "Future of Finance" accelerator 2022 cohort.

ValueCo values the diversity of its employees and serves as part of its mission-driven corporate commitments. We foster a work environment where individual differences are recognised, respected, and valued to develop the full potential and harness each individual's talents.

This thesis aims to analyse the correlation between listed corporates' financial and extra-financial performances before providing guidelines to explicitly embed ESG into financial models (valuation, risk assessment, return predictions).

The rapidly evolving ESG landscape and growing market demand for ESG products entail new risks for all stakeholders in the ecosystem. Standards, frameworks, and initiatives have multiplied to the point that the market and investor claims are almost impossible to monitor and understand properly. The indicators that drive sustainable investment and measure the ESG performances of financial assets are still mostly inefficient and prone to greenwashing.

The inherent complexity of finding correlations between extra-financial data and companies' financial performances is enhanced by the low correlation between ESG scores. Available ESG scores from rating agencies and data providers already show a low correlation, as detailed by Chatterji et al. in a 2015 paper, and the multiplication of models is likely to worsen this phenomenon. The raw data underlying these scores still needs to improve the quality to support efficient decision-making.

Consequently, scores sold by rating agencies and data providers show wide divergences and, combined with their lack of transparency, are almost impossible to compare and understand properly. Many asset managers develop proprietary internal scoring models to compensate for this opacity and justify their ESG commitment. The problem with the diversity of scores and methodologies is that they reflect investor disagreements that affect asset prices, as Eugene F. Fama and Kenneth R. French demonstrated.

To address these issues, ValueCo gathers the proprietary ESG scores of professional asset managers to compare them anonymously and provide them with analytics on their market positioning and biases. It helps them identify the top and bottom performers in their investment universe. It also brings a quantitative assessment of their ESG scoring strategy to communicate with asset owners and individual investors.

This topic has been widely studied with various methods and conclusions over the past decades. The aim is to examine the correlation between ESG signals and various financial metrics and analyse the contribution of each factor in the ESG score to these results (Moinak Maiti, 2021). Most of these academic articles used ratings from scoring agencies or public ratings to test their hypotheses. We propose reproducing some of the most promising results with our original database of asset managers’ proprietary scores to get closer to companies' actual ESG market value.

This research topic can involve iteratively using statistical transformations and noise-correction methods on the ESG signals, regression and correlation analysis with financial performances, as well as financial model design, backtesting and predictions to support the conclusions of the thesis.

A potential title for this thesis could be “Integrating ESG into financial models: challenges, scope and limitations”.

You can find a bibliography in the PDF offer and find more references in ValueCo’s library of sustainable finance resources.

• Fluent use of the English language (reading, writing, scientific discussion).
• Data science and statistics, ideally with Python coding skills.
• Candidate profile and interest: some text
  • Financial valuation and ESG scoring models,
  • Motivation for research and bibliographic monitoring,
  • You enjoy quantitative analysis, open-ended and multifaceted problems,
  • You have a genuine drive to find out more about sustainable finance and make it the new norm,
  • Willingness to meet many people from the sustainable development and responsible finance ecosystems to tackle your cross-disciplinary research topic.

• 35 k€ total yearly gross salary,
• Flexible remote working policy (or physically in Paris),
• Computer and remote working equipment subsidy,
• Corporate health insurance,
• Restaurant vouchers, public transport passes,
• Continuous training depending on your needs.

Once you have submitted your application, enclosing an up-to-date CV or LinkedIn profile and a GitHub account if you have one, we will contact you for a series of three interviews:

1.     A 30-minute telephone interview will tell you more about ValueCo and answer your initial questions.

2.     Depending on your experience, we will send you a quick technical test to complete before the following interview.

3.     A one-hour face-to-face interview to debrief the test and discuss your skills.

4.     A final 30-minute interview to discuss our corporate culture and answer your final questions.