Many developers are building tools and applications to serve sustainability-related markets. These markets include supply chain management, consumer purchase, retail investing, and management decision support. An important input into these programs is data about the sustainability performance of the companies they touch. CSRHub’s RESTful Application Programming Interface (CSRA) has become widely used in these applications.
Without CSRHub’s consensus signal, it is hard to understand the different results that other ESG data sets provide. It is also hard to bridge the coverage of other data sets—since most ESG data sets cover only 3,000 to 8,000 entities. Finally, while other ESG data sets may contain more indicators, most of them are not available (not filled in). In contrast, CSRHub has stable, monthly ratings on virtually every public company and many private entities and not-for-profits. Its 12 indicators are generally completely filled in for any major company. CSRA is designed to allow developers to create their applications without requiring support or programming resources from CSRHub. To implement CSRA, developers architect their back-end server to respond to specifically structured REST requests in an expected way. A developer must begin each session with a login transaction that establishes a secure session. The CSRHub server inspects these credentials and uses them to associate the request with a user ID and profile ID. It then delivers a profile-adjusted rating to the requesting application. User profile information also determines the default month for the data set that the user receives. Because CSRA is conditioned by user profiles, it is easy for an application to adjust CSRHub ratings to meet the particular views and needs of each different user of the application.