Shifting investor expectations, regional regulatory dynamics, and rapid advances in data and technology continue to shape the sustainable finance landscape. In this interview, Catalina Secreteanu, Managing Director, Market Development, speaks with Gregory Van Droogenbroeck, Chief Product Officer, to get his perspective on how Sustainalytics is evolving its product strategy to deliver clearer, more actionable insights for our diverse global client base.
Catalina Secreteanu: Greg, it's wonderful to have you on board, and you're joining at a moment when investor expectations and sustainability demands are evolving quickly in different parts of the world. How do you think about that as you start your role as Chief Product Officer?
Gregory Van Droogenbroeck: The sustainable finance environment is becoming more complex as regulations evolve and expectations for sustainability data increase. As investors and companies continue to look for clearer, more actionable insights, Sustainalytics needs to focus on delivering high-quality data, deep research, and solutions that simplify decision-making.
It’s important to remember that different clients have different needs, and it’s essential that we’re able to meet them. Passive investors typically tend to approach things more systematically, while active investors often take a more bottoms-up approach. There’s also a bit of a regional fracture happening within sustainability. In Europe, the market is still very much regulation-driven, while we continue to see more of a backlash against ESG in the US. Clients across regions continue to have values-based requirements – aligning investments with personal, ethical, or moral beliefs – but these vary by geography.
My priority is to always deliver on clients’ expectations. We continue to invest in our people, methodologies, and technology to ensure our offerings meet market expectations. While the industry is changing quickly, we are committed to delivering reliable insights.
Our clients are varied and have a wide range of objectives, from asset allocation to portfolio performance monitoring. Sustainalytics’ offerings are equally as varied. By utilizing deep datasets and research, with specific clients' needs in mind, we’re able to meet our customers where they need to be. Although there’s a lot that needs to be covered, it’s really exciting to be in sustainability at the moment.
CS: You bring extensive product and data leadership experience into this role. How can data providers like Sustainalytics deliver better data and research to our clients, both in terms of the type of data and research, but also in terms of delivery?
GVD: Looking at my first few weeks at Sustainalytics, we have fantastic human capital with a lot of deep expertise in sustainability, and our product strategy is centered on ensuring our products align with what investors and companies need most: clarity and consistency.
It’s one thing to create the insights, research, and data, but it’s another thing entirely to actually deliver these things to our clients. While some clients want our data to be cloud-native and seamlessly integrated, others are still using the traditional platforms. We’re continuously ensuring that we’re making everything as easy as possible for each of our clients, driving our platform strategy accordingly, and continuing to connect our sustainability capabilities across the broader Morningstar ecosystem.
I am also convinced that what we’re seeing emerge on the AI-side will effectively change how our clients will consume our information, data, and research, and we have a lot of ongoing initiatives to enable AI in some of our existing tools and applications. If our clients want us to leverage the capabilities of AI, then we need to assess our workflow and think about how best to do so.
Moving forward, we’re continuing to enhance the quality, depth, and usability of our data and solutions. Making sure our offerings remain responsive to the shifting market, and that our clients are able to confidently navigate the increasingly dynamic sustainability landscape, remains a priority. The product team and I will focus on meeting and consulting with clients to understand their pain points, and embedding ourselves into their workflows.
CS: As you settle into your role, and based on your experience working closely with global investors, what do you consider to be Sustainalytics’ top three priorities from a product perspective?
GVD: It’s a milestone year for Sustainalytics because we’re putting in our application to become an ESMA-regulated ESG provider, and so our regulatory readiness program will be one of our most important initiatives in 2026. This isn’t just a way to be compliant with EU regulations, it’s a way of being even more transparent with our clients regarding our methodology, data, and research.
Secondly, we’re always looking to enhance and improve the quality of our existing products. We have a well-penetrated and mature product offering within ESG ratings, product involvement, controversies, and regulatory data, and the team has been doing an excellent job on the transition side of things, so I’m excited to work more on the physical aspect of climate risk. This is an area in which we’re really looking to grow our capabilities.
Thirdly, private markets are growing, and we want to leverage the well-respected methodologies and processes that we already use to service our public-market clients, and extend those capabilities effectively to the private markets.
All in all, many clients tell us that bringing sustainability and financial information together remains a challenge. In our recent ESG data survey,1 we found that data often comes from multiple sources and formats, with varying levels of granularity. Understandably, this makes it difficult to derive clear, useful insights.
Our product work is focused on reducing that friction. We’re working on our dataset connection, the usability of our research, and the intuitiveness of our workflows. This should help clients spend less time reconciling information, and more time applying it. One of our biggest goals this year is making it easier for users to access the insights they need, in formats that fit naturally into their existing processes.
CS: You've been in the data and research space for a very long time, and have more recently – in the last 10 years or so – pivoted towards sustainability and climate. What are your thoughts about the sector as a whole, and the role that Sustainalytics has to play within it?
GVD: I landed within the sustainability data space out of a business conviction. Data, research, and product management are all things that I love, but sustainability for me takes on a completely different dimension – it's a personal conviction. However, at the end of the day, sustainability is a business, and there’s a real reason for this business to exist.
Personally, I don’t have too many problems with some of the current pushback within the ESG space. The reality is, the sector overall has been subject to greenwashing, so I think it’s great that we can now refocus on what really matters.
We’re going back to making things very distinct. Sustainalytics is a service provider; we provide high-quality data to our clients to enable them to make investment decisions. Some of these are values driven, and some of them are value driven, and we need to be honest about that. Somewhere at the top of the hype, perhaps “values” and “value” were getting confused.
As a company, Sustainalytics has spent more than three decades building a deep base of sustainability research, supported by global coverage of more than 20,000 companies across 160 countries. I’m pleased that with continued investment in our people, data, and technology, we’re able to continue helping clients navigate an increasingly complex landscape.
References
- Morningstar Sustainalytics. 2026. “The 2025 State of ESG Data Survey Report.” https://connect.sustainalytics.com/state-of-esg-data-report.
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