BITA and FreeCap Financial Partner to Launch The FREE Index (FREEIN)
[April 24, 2024, Frankfurt] – BITA and FreeCap Financial, a leader in data-driven criminal justice reform, are proud to kickstart their indexing partnership with the launch of The FreeCap Financial BITA Decarceration Index.
This collaboration aims to provide investors with a solution for tracking the performance of publicly traded companies recognized for their commitment to fair chance hiring and prison risk mitigation. Specifically, it focuses on large capitalization institutions listed on regulated U.S. exchanges.
The Index, which launched with an initial value of 1000 on April 23rd, employs a unique weighting mechanism by incorporating a custom Criminal Justice Lens score. This ensures that the index accurately measures the performance of its 50 constituents. Additionally, the Index follows a quarterly rebalancing and reconstitution schedule to maintain its relevance and timeliness.
"We are excited to partner with BITA to make investing in decarceration possible through public markets," states Tanay Tatum-Edwards, Founder & CEO of FreeCap Financial. "There are 70 million adults in the US with an arrest record who are systematically discriminated against in the job market, despite the ongoing labor shortage crisis. This index identifies companies taking necessary steps to hire from this demographic and remain competitive in tomorrow’s workforce."
"Similarly, the companies that make this list must not rely on increased incarceration rates to drive profit. The index includes a negative screen for companies with significant profits from incarceration-related activities," she adds.
Victor Hugo Gomez, CEO of BITA comments “We are happy to support FreeCap Financial, a leading justice and prison risk data research provider, on their exciting and differentiated initiative. By leveraging our world-class index creation and calculation infrastructure, IP providers can launch innovative financial solutions and open new monetization avenues for their data and IP. We are excited to welcome Freecap as a trusted and valued customer.”
Leveraging BITA's expertise in global index administration and calculation, alongside FreeCap Financial's racial-justice-informed datasets, this partnership will offer a tailor-made financial solution for fair chance hiring and prison risk mitigation.
About FreeCap Financial Inc
FreeCap Financial Inc (hereafter also referred as “FreeCap”) is a US-based research company that provides investors and money managers with intelligent, criminal justice-oriented data that helps them manage prison risk in their portfolios.
FreeCap uses public data sources to track the participation of publicly traded companies in the U.S. prison industrial complex and applies its scoring methodology to evaluate how these companies contribute positively or negatively to mass incarceration.
About BITA
BITA is a leading technology-enabled Fintech, focused on the provision of investment customization technology, indexes, and indexing solutions to asset & wealth managers, registered investment advisors and other financial institutions across multiple markets. From traditional passive investing to direct indexing, BITA’s infrastructure has been designed to support investment customization at scale.
BITACore is BITA’s cloud-based index development and investment customization platform. BITACore is available both in a web-based version as well as APIs, and can support a variety of applications, from traditional institutional indexing to direct indexing.