Sustainable Investment Platform

Our idea is to create a platform where people can learn about sustainability in finance and invest in a carbon-neutral way. This will be achieved by
(1) Personal & Sustainable Finance Education for all
(2) Eliminate the all-or-none approach between investment and sustainability by providing a sensible option that balances returns and carbon emissions.
(3) Improve process and increase efficiency in extracting 'carbon factors' data from multiple sources by using Natural Language Processing and other AI-powered techniques that can learn to extract this information in smarter and more efficient, and environment-friendly ways.

There is a need from actual end consumers for a sustainable financial product. In our preliminary market research, we conduct interviews and questionnaires amongst different, groups of people and we identified 2 groups of potential customers.
(1) Young professionals and College students – For this group of clients, climate change and sustainability are topics that they are aware of and would love to do something about it. They are also the group of people who are deeply concerned about their financial stability, given the explosive rise in the cost of living. Our initial survey (N=30) shows that this group is keen on using our products (70% - positive response in adopting our product) from day one. (2) Institutional investors - For this group, we are offering our models to improve their carbon intensity calculation and process improvement in anticipation of carbon intensity becoming a mandatory requirement in the future. As of date, there has been no known accepted standard, and current offerings are still limited to only a few institutions in Europe.

The Serviceable Available Market in Europe for us is people aged between 18-35 years old. There are approximately 158 Million individuals in this age group, and around 5 million individuals turn 18 every year in Europe. This is calculated from a total market of 417 Million individuals aged between 18-60 in Europe. We predict that at the initial launch, we could obtain approximately 1 Million individuals; this is due to regulatory concerns.

For this product, the revenue mechanism is from
(1) Subscription Fee where users would pay each month to use the service
(2) Transaction Fee, where users would pay for each investment transaction. We hope to collect a lower fee for transactions involved in green energy or sustainable companies.

For the team, we have several years of experience between us
Jay – MSc Entrepreneurship & Innovation. I have prior experience in a start-up in the social commerce sector as one of the founding teams in Bangkok, Thailand, leading in product management and digital marketing efforts.
Paul - MSc in Climate Change Finance and Investment. He developed a model to calculate carbon intensity and is recognized for his ability and experience in sustainability efforts in Edinburgh and back in Columbia.
Nico - MSc Artificial Intelligence. He had a prior background in the financial sector as a senior data scientist. As a team, our skills and backgrounds are complementary, which would help us build a great product!