We worked for many years in financial institutions. Jérôme and Marc have a combined experience of more than 25 years in carbon finance. They were leaders of the emergence of impact finance within Société Générale, in particular with the creation of Orbeo, the joint venture dedicated to carbon-offsetting projects within the framework of the Kyoto Protocol. Meanwhile, Jérémy was working on the creation and development of YOMONI, the leading roboadvisor in France.
We combined our expertise in 2019 to create Judo CARES, the first carbon offset one-stop shop dedicated to financial institutions. Our ambition is to enable them to offer all investors the opportunity to play a role in the fight against climate change.
Our vision is that the climate emergency is the main challenge of humanity for the years to come; investors and financial players have a leading role to play in addressing this challenge.Fortunately, companies are becoming increasingly aware that actions must be taken, without waiting for states to agree on strong measures. These companies are voluntarily reducing their carbon footprint today. They promote the consumption of renewable energies and are implement measures to reduce their emissions. Moreover, they are willing to endorse even greater responsibility for their emissions by compensating them with carbon-offset projects.
The principle of these projects is to finance actions that capture or reduce greenhouse gases’ emissions. This can involve for example improving the waste management or the energy efficiency of certain household equipments, or building small-scale renewable energy production facilities. Thus, by providing financing without which these projects would not exist, a company compensates the residual negative impact of its activity on the climate.
How can managers and savers also take action?
But how can an asset manager or a bank also contribute to the fight against climate change? As a shareholder or a lender, it might be in a position to influence the management decisions of the companies it lends to or invests in, and thus contribute to GHG emission reduction strategies.
In addition, a financial portfolio manager is able to choose his/her investments according to his/her views on environmental issues and to the corresponding guidelines he/she has established. Such selection policy will have a long-term impact on the behaviour of companies in the same way that individuals influence brands through their consumption choices.
The above-mentioned actions do have a positive impact on climate change, but their effects are slow and indirect, and will not be sufficient to address the urgent climate-related issues. So what can the asset managers do? Their difficulty of addressing the climate-related challenges sometimes translates into an ESG investment offering that tends to be too broad and based on imprecise criteria; this is particularly the case on the subject of environmental impact, even though this is at the heart of investors’ concerns, as studies on the topic have shown.
This is where Judo CARES comes in. This is the first carbon offsetting one-stop shop for asset managers and banks. Our purpose is to enable our clients to offer a simple and clear solution to their investors: for each type of funds or investment solution (retail funds, institutional liquid funds, life insurance units, private equity and private debt funds,) in their range, they can now propose a carbon-offset option to their investors.
How does Judo CARES work?
Judo CARES is a fully integrated solution which automatically measures the daily carbon footprint of an investment portfolio by aggregating the emissions of the underlying companies or assets. In a second step, thanks to its architecture open to the world of project developers, we offer a pre-selection of offsetting projects chosen for their environmental impact and their relevance with respect to our client’s objectives, and following the best international standards. We then invest in the projects on behalf of our client.
Depending on our client’s needs, we can manage the global offsetting strategy over the life ot the investment portfolio. All this is transparent, fast and easy for the portfolio manager, since the daily calculation of the portfolio’s carbon footprint can be automated and Judo CARES manages all the interactions with the project developers.
Why the name Judo CARES?
Because Judo means “the way to flexibility” in Japanese. And that our ambition is to offer flexible CArbon REduction Solutions that use the immense leverage of finance to combat climate change; a leverage whose power also lies in the sum of the individual wills of its investors.