Camille Socquet-Clerc On Adapting Financial Technology To Protect The Environment

Camille Socquet-Clerc is the founder of Bloom Impact Investing, a fintech startup with a climate impact mission.

Her passion is to help Australians become heroes of our climate transition, by making climate impact investing easy, accessible and financially rewarding. Bloom offers a mobile investing app allowing people to invest in a climate impact fund starting from $500. By investing with Bloom, people can do well and do good by supporting climate impact companies and projects such as solar farms or recycling infrastructure.

But Bloom is not just a financial product, it's also a community of people using their money power for good, gathering every month to learn about impact investing and sustainable finance.

Camille discusses her insights into the impact investing space, what is required to get a start-up off the ground and how to secure sustainable investments.

Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)

[Tom Allen] - Camille, can you please share a little bit about your background and what led to your interest and passion in impact investing?

[Camille Socquet-Clerc] - For 10 years I actually worked in the digital marketing space. Back in 2018, I read a report that changed my life, and it was the fifth IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report. At that point, I learned that we had 10 years left to shift our entire economy if we wanted to avoid catastrophic climate change. I decided to switch my career to focus on climate impact, and by joining a company called EnergyLab, I discovered the enormous opportunities that existed in climate impact and clean energy transitions, and I totally fell in love with it. When I started working for EnergyLab, I started to become frustrated and at the same time fascinated with the clean energy industry.

My personal frustration was that I could see the growth and opportunity to invest in clean technology and energy, but I couldn't do it for myself.

Most impact funds required me to be a sophisticated investor. In other words, this is a wealthy investor with an income level of $250,000. Alternatively, the forms of impact I wanted to invest in required me to have $50,000, and I thought this wasn't fair. This is where Bloom comes from. I wanted to make investing in clean energy and technology more accessible.

It sounds like a real barrier if only a sophisticated investor or someone with a minimum of $50,000 can invest. It just doesn't sound easy for everyday people to get involved.

It's such a shame, because not many people know that cleantech investing and clean energy investing is a huge opportunity. There's an index that I love talking about to raise awareness called the Deloitte Cleantech Index. It's essentially tracking the performance of Australian cleantech stocks, and the sector has returned a 39.7% five-year growth, versus the ASX 200 who have only returned 13%. The Deloitte sector has been outperforming the ASX 200 for now six years in a row, and no one knows about it and access it.

Is it because the people that do know about it just want a bigger part of the clean technology sector?

Potentially, but it's also because investing in clean energy like solar projects and wind requires a lot of capital and it's a very illiquid investment. It's not well suited to investors or individuals like you and me as we need investments to be safe and liquid. We need to get our money in and out of an investment easily, and no one has designed a product to allow this. This is where Bloom comes in, and what we do is not rocket science, but again, no one has done it before.

We blend those illiquid investment assets such as solar farms, recycling facilities with more liquid investments. These are stocks internationally or domestically listed so people like you and I can invest in impactful projects like farms, yet you can still get your money in and out.

Since recently launching the Bloom Investing app, your community has already invested over $500,000. Tell us more about this app and where you are taking it? What are your goals for the next year?

The app allows people to invest in a climate impact fund starting from and investment of $500. We launched back in late March, and we have now had over one hundred customers who've invested half a million dollars. It's fantastic to see the response. I think Australians are ready to put power behind their money, and the app essentially allows people to deposit their money (a direct debit) and automate their investment while adding a little bit every fortnight or month. Our goal is to really scale the amount of capital we can deploy in impactful, clean energy projects and companies like solar farms, solar energy and green bonds. In other words, we really want our customers to know that their money is going towards a good impact.

How do we know though that these investments are going towards creating an impact? What sort of due diligence are you doing for the people you invest for?

I'm so glad you're asking this question because greenwashing is a huge issue in financial services. How do we have transparency at Bloom? We decided to solely focus on climate science-based investing, which includes thematic investing, stocks centred around 'climate impact'. We use two of the most robust climate science models, which I really recommend your listeners have a look at called Project Drawdown and Climate Works. These two climate science models map our transition towards net zero in all parts of the economy. What Bloom did is just reuse the climate solution model that these research groups have put together. This gave us 82 climate solutions we could invest in. With Bloom, our customers have the confidence that each and every investment is mapped to at least one of these climate solutions that have the potential for removing gigatons of emissions from the atmosphere. That's how we think about impact essentially.

There's a huge and growing interest in understanding, mapping and measuring impact. It's important for social enterprise and start-ups that are impact-led, but is it possible for us to really understand what those metrics are, and the impact being created?

That's a very difficult question. We haven't cracked it ourselves; everyone would love a very nice and neat ‘CO2 emissions removed’ metric. However, it's complicated for many reasons. The main reasons that I can share with you today is the fact that companies and organisations don't report on their impact in the same way; it's very hard to have homogeneous metrics, and it's also really hard to trace the truth of this reporting. Unless it's backed by blockchain or a totally transparent and traceable mechanism, it remains reporting done by a company or an organisation, which is hard to audit.

Does Bloom have some goals or targets in terms of the amount that you are looking to get invested by your customers in order to make that impactful change?

Of course! We hope to reach 20 million dollars in impactful capital next year. We do have a big stretch goal!

In terms of raising capital, along this journey to get Bloom off the ground you raised over $650,000 in investment. What advice would you give to other founders who are seeking investments?

There are many ways you can raise capital, but my two key takeaways from this journey is that you need to build momentum first and ask for advice.

On building momentum, instead of asking for money, I think it's best to focus on validating your idea with real customers because that's ultimately what investors will be looking at.

They need to see that your solution is loved and wanted by real people, and you have clear evidence of this. For Bloom this was building a community through events and having wait lists where people pledged to invest.

When we had over 600 people pledging over $3 million, investors started taking us seriously. The second piece of advice is asking for advice.

I love the saying, “ask for advice and you'll get money and ask for money you'll get advice”. I think it's very true, and the less you need money, the easier it is to ask for it.

That seems a little backward, but investors need to feel like you could succeed even without their money. It's a bit like the chicken and egg conundrum, but they also need to know that they can trust you and build a relationship with them in the long run. You need to work on this relationship early on. This is why you need to ask for advice and build a relationship first. Then, when it's time and you've proved over and over again you are delivering on what you promised you would do, this is when the money becomes easier to raise. I'll just add one last thing. Many of my investors have been people I had as mentors very early on. Some have seen my progress over the past two years, so it's a long-term game for sure.

Speaking of the issue 'mentor whiplash', I'm sure having all of those different voices come in and providing advice, questions or strategies over the last few years may have resulted in contradictory views being voiced. How did you deal with this issue?

That's such a great question, because that's something I've done poorly at the beginning. I think this was due to a lack of confidence and perhaps the fact that I was tackling an industry I was not really comfortable in, which is financial services. I spent too much time talking to too many different people and hearing too many opinions.

My take on it is I now prioritise feedback from people who've done what I want to achieve, and I take more seriously the advice from other entrepreneurs than people working in 'safer environments' I'm going to call it.

9 times out of 10, the best advice I receive is from people who've built things themselves.

In your journey to get investment, what gaps did you observe for people and organisations to better support social entrepreneurs financially?

In my humble opinion, there is really a gap at the very beginning, and this is where programs like Elevate+ that you run are so important. I think there's still a huge bias in thinking that purpose-led ventures cannot be as profitable as standard companies. There are unfortunately some expectations set by fast green technology models that have shaped investor's expectations about making a quick 10x investment return. It's so hard to compete with. That is not often how you build long lasting social change. For example, Bloom is often compared to other companies like Raiz or Spaceship, but these companies have zero community focus and environmental benefit. The money they spend on advertising and growth we will spend in research and ethical endeavours, so I think there's a gap in education. The other gap I've noticed is perhaps with the grant system where I see a bit of a mismatch between the amount of work required to apply to these grants and the resources available in social enterprises. There are some wonderful initiatives to support social enterprises and female founders in Australia and I really commend these programs. But the work required to apply is astronomical, and I think it's not fair to ask such an application process to very small structures who have to choose between running their business and applying for these grants. I wish they were a bit simpler to apply for.

As a past participant in the Elevate+ Accelerator program, what were some of the key lessons that you took away that would be valuable for other purpose-led entrepreneurs seeking to create impact?

First of all, I'm so grateful for the Elevate+ program. Back then, Bloom was just an idea and vision, and there was so much work ahead of us. You trusted me and gave me a chance, so I'm really grateful. But in terms of takeaways, I think the key learning for me was regarding maturing my vision of what it means to have an impact. I think it's all well and good and easy to start with good intentions. But creating a theory of change and thinking about your impact measurement is hard work. I think Elevate+ is giving people a better idea and tools to really shape the impact you want to make as a company. The other thing I would say is the program helped me think about every single aspect of the business, but also helped me understand there are things that need to happen in the right order. It's so easy to get lost when you start a company with all the things you have to build.

Elevate+ taught me that you have to start with customer validation and nailing your understanding of the problem, and that's a hundred times more crucial than having your brand or financial model finalised.

What inspiring projects or initiatives have you come across recently that you think are creating really positive social change?

I'm going to stay on the topic of finance, and that's a good bridge to your previous question. This is because I'm really not in love with just our solution at Bloom, I'm in love with the problem, which is how can we change our financial system to help nature and not extract our Earth’s resources for profit.

I commend all organisations that help people draw the link between our financial system and climate impact, as well as providing financial education.

I am really worried about the climate and the ‘social impact’ of investment schemes like cryptocurrency trading and buy now pay later companies such as Afterpay. They really pushed people to invest in risky strategies and spend money they don't have on things they don't need. In terms of organisations that I admire and watch, I love Future Super. They help people remove their superannuation fossil fuels and they use their brand as a voice to expose the fossil fuel industry and call out political inaction on climate change. Another organisation I really love is Market Forces. That's a not-for-profit doing independent research on the ties between financial institutions, banks, superannuation and the climate crisis. It really helps people lift their awareness, but it also doesn't always have to be about donations. Market Forces has helped people lobby their banks and financial institutions to cut ties with financing harmful projects and help fix the climate crisis.

To wrap up then Camille, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?

I would recommend Investing To Save The Planet by Alice Ross, a brilliant demonstration of the link between your money and impact. Alice was a reporter at The Financial Times, she writes things in such a brilliant way.