Hi, my name is Alexandre. I am the co-founder of Keewe. So basically Keewe is a fintech that helps companies to start their low carbon transition. Before creating Keewe, I started my career as a foreign exchange salesperson in a French bank. There, I was trying to help companies to manage their foreign currency payments. Let's take an example: you have a supplier in China, and you need to pay them in US dollars in the Chinese currency, so you have to manage the financial risk. After that, I went into the consulting industry, still in the financial services where I took charge of projects related to regulation, technology, and innovation and, then I created Keewe.
Finance & Ecological transition
To create a link between finance and the ecological transition in the B to B market you have several ways. Let's keep in mind that the main idea is to better drive capital flows such as finance towards financing a new low-carbon world or economy. This can be done through several instances. If we set aside the BtoB market and we think about BtoC, individuals can go, for instance, to green neo banks that are going to offer basic banking services but in a greener or in a green way. You have several examples in France, Onlyone, GreenGot, Helios for instance. But you can also work with Goodvest, a fintech company that helps you align your savings with two-degree compatible worlds. If now we go back to the B to B market as a company, finance is everywhere. If you have excess cash, you have a bit of treasury, you want to invest your excess cash, you can try to select greener products for instance.
Knowledge & Complexity
If you want to invest a larger amount of money into the transformation of your business model, you need to create a new process for your production process. You need to build a new plant somewhere in France or abroad. You can of course go to a bank and ask for a green loan for green bonds to finance something green or to help you engage in the green transition.
Law, Commercials & Talent Influence
Finance and ecological transition are poorly understood topics, especially because the ecological transition is not well enough covered, especially within the media area, but also when you go to universities and academic institutions, there is a big share of the content that isn’t being diffused. Of course, it's gaining ground, you can see now in mass media, YouTube channels, a lot of videos are talking more and more about what is the ecological transition, what is at stake when we talk about climate change, and even in university, in high school, the topic is also making progress. You now have the idea of how to integrate into the curriculum the basic knowledge of what is the climate, how it changes, and how to better confront and tackle these issues in engineering, business, technology, and training courses.
Green Finance & Ethics
So of course companies are interested in this concept of green finance and in a way to link their financing or finance in general to their low carbon transition. You have maybe the very convinced ones, the companies that have at the very core the idea of engaging in the low transition economy, but they are still a minority. On the other hand, you also have companies that are maybe not that convinced but do need to do it for several reasons. There is of course the regulation driver that is going to force them to adapt, to change, to be aligned with the laws. We have the Paris agreement that is requiring different business sectors to make efforts to reduce their carbon emissions. This is the law. You have another driver, that is the commercial one. If your clients now ask you to reduce your environmental impact or to further engage in the low carbon transition, you're going to have to do it if you want to keep your clients, keep your market share, and then just keep your company alive. There is another driver that is coming from within the company which will be the pressure of the employees of the associates and even maybe from the young talents, the new generations asking more and more from the CEO, from the top management to transform the company so that it is a two degrees compatible company.
Ethics influences the democratization of green finance in several ways, but the main idea of why it does it's because it is bringing the CEO or the top management of the business to take into consideration other indicators than the traditional financial ones. As a company, if you now look at the environmental impact, the carbon impact of your company, of your production value chain within the world, the social impact of your plans and suppliers in Asia, Africa, or elsewhere in Europe, of course, you're going to look at different ways to finance the investments of your company. Ethics may have been seen before as a very specific share of finance, but it's like a buzzword now. It's getting sexier by the time because it means you are going to care about new indicators, not only the financial ones. When you integrate ethics into your decision-making process, you are going at a very wide range of indicators and you are looking at green finance to help you reach new goals and reach new targets indicators in environmental impact, social impact, and of course the financial ones.
