Strengthening our ESG strategy

Our commitment to sustainability and corporate responsibility is in line with our goal of applying our ingenuity, innovative technology, and electronic network to make global credit markets work better for the people who depend on them. In pursuing this commitment, we embrace our responsibility as a corporate citizen to ensure that our global activities positively impact our communities and our environment. MarketAxess launched our ESG program in 2019 after taking into consideration the views of our stakeholders, including our employees, investors, clients, and regulators. Under the oversight of the Nominating and Corporate Governance Committee of our Board, we formed an internal ESG Working Group comprised of employees from across the Company and sponsored by some of our senior executives. In 2021, the Working Group focused on the topics that most concern our stakeholders. We continue to consider recommendations from the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) and Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), now part of the Value Reporting Foundation. In 2020, we introduced reporting against the non-financial metrics outlined by SASB for the following sectors: Security & Commodity Exchanges, Professional & Commercial Services and Software & IT Services.

 

 

Stakeholder engagement and materiality assessment

In 2021, we conducted our first comprehensive non-financial ESG materiality and prioritization assessment, which identified 18 key ESG topics and six priority topics critical for MarketAxess to manage and drive long-term business performance and societal impact. The process included a full landscape assessment of our potential ESG topics of interest, drawing from topics covered by SASB and various ESG ratings agencies, with an eye toward the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. We engaged with internal and external stakeholders, including our employees, management, clients, and shareholders, through a survey asking for our stakeholders’ perspective on the relative importance of the identified ESG topics. We plan to conduct such an assessment every few years.