Our product is changing. We aren’t. How Cooler Future will contribute to fighting climate change.

With all the recent announcements we have made regarding the discontinuation of our app you probably have been wondering in which direction Cooler Future is going next. 

Today, we want to shed some light on this question and we can promise you one thing: It’s quite exciting! 

In the past week we therefore asked our CEO Sebastian all the juicy questions there are regarding the (cooler) future of our company. 

Let’s dig into it!

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Hey Sebastian. Thanks for taking the time! Cooler Future is going into a new direction. Could you briefly explain where you’re taking the company?
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‍Cooler Future was always about offering high quality impact investing services to help fight climate change. We’re still doing that, only now focusing on a different customer group. Our consumer app received a ton of positive feedback, which made us really proud, but with energy prices skyrocketing people understandably had other financial worries than investing for impact. Additionally, we noticed in the past two years that education within the investment space is still limited for a lot of people, making it quite hard for us to explain the impact sustainable investing can have!

Since we are a small company with limited resources, we therefore decided to close the app and focus on professional investors instead. Our experience is that these investors have a large and growing interest in impact investing, but that the market for impact investment services is still underdeveloped. We aim to change that by offering our extensive capabilities to firms who lack such. 

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Ah okay, that does make sense but sounds like quite the big change, too! Is the vision of Cooler Future to “save the planet from climate change” still remaining the same? 

Yes, absolutely. The fact that climate change is the biggest issue of our time is not changing and our opinion isn’t as well. We still want to contribute to the mitigation of climate change and believe that directing capital away from fossil fuels and other harmful activities and into sustainable investment targets is a really effective way to do so. With our new strategy, we just slightly changed how we will reach our goal.  

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That’s good to hear! Could you also explain in more detail how you want to make this vision possible? What product or service is Cooler Future going to offer? 

Regarding our new customer group, we are going to work with professional investors. This basically means that we will be working with companies such as family offices, foundations and asset management companies. We will be helping them to assess and analyze impact investment targets which will accelerate their transition to more sustainable ways of investment. We can, for example, analyze their existing investment portfolios and assess the impact of those investments. We can also help them to analyze investment targets that they are planning to invest in, and make recommendations on which ones would have the most positive impact. 

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How does Cooler Future differentiate itself from other market participants? What are the strengths and the value proposition? 

‍Lately, there has been a lot of criticism directed towards ESG and sustainable investing. Part of the problem is related to the fact that ESG to a large extent is a ‘black box’, where the investor has very little insight into the real impact of their investments. (Greenwashing is still a big thing!)

To simplify, ESG has become a ‘tick the right boxes’ - process with limited real value and very questionable actual impact. We want to address this by offering high quality, transparent impact analysis, where the investor has all the necessary facts and data before making a decision. In practice, this means that if we claim that a fund or a company has positive impact, we can point to every data point behind that claim, and demonstrate the calculations behind it. This way, the investor can study the whole chain of reasoning, and not only the final score. 

Another thing that we as a small player can offer our customers is flexibility. We’re not restricted by too many processes, and can adjust our offering to fit the needs of the investors. 

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What do you think are the biggest problems and challenges in the impact investing market? How does Cooler Future contribute to solving these problems? 

‍The lack of transparency of impact investment services is certainly one of the biggest challenges. To some extent this is being addressed by new legislation such as the SFDR (Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation by the European Union).  Another, related issue is the lack of reliable impact data. Scope 1 and 2 reporting is improving but still absent for many companies but Scope 3 reporting is still not at the level it should be. At Cooler Future, we solve both of these issues with our transparent reporting: even less-than-perfect data can be used when it’s made crystal clear to the customer what level of accuracy can be expected. 

Where do you see Cooler Future in 5 years?

‍I’ll put it short and sweet: 5 years from now, Cooler Future is the most trusted service provider in the impact investing field, and we have helped to reduce 1GT of carbon emissions.