Full disclosure: I snuck an invitation to a Farad Finance Forum several years ago before I really knew Farad’s CEO, Marco Caldana, and found it highly informative.
Last year’s event on sustainable finance, in fact, was the first very welcome, refreshing and carefully organised “live” conference I attended after months of coronavirus lockdown and zoom overdose.
So this year, I immediately accepted Marco’s invitation that VitalBriefing be a media sponsor of this year’s Forum on Thursday, 10 June. In fact, I would have tried to sneak another invitation if he hadn’t asked as the theme couldn’t be closer to our company’s heart: “Green Ocean & Liquidity,” focused on “how the flow of capital into sustainable finance and the circular economy will change the post-pandemic asset management and insurance industries.”
Who’s there
Many of our clients and friends will be participating and/or attending, including the CSSF’s Claude Marx with the keynote address, Niccolo Polli, CEO of HSBC Luxembourg (who I will have the pleasure to interview on stage), Annemarie Arens, an independent director and leading light on the subject, independent director Tom Pfeiffer, Circularity guru Romain Poulles and Sachin Vankalas, General Director of LuxFlag, another organisation we work with.
The day-long event will offer regulatory updates, evolving legal frameworks, examples of best practices from Luxembourg and Europe and insights into the latest sustainability-relevant trends in banking, investment funds, asset management and insurance.
Why we care
The reason this event is so relevant for us? We’ve moved with both corporate feet into “all things sustainability” over the past 12 months, producing customised Briefings and related content for various Luxembourg private and public sector clients including Allianz, the ministries of Environment, Economy and Energy, Luxembourg for Finance and the European Investment Bank. In fact, the issue is so important that we’ve just created our own monthly Sustainable Finance News & Insights Briefing, available here directly from our website.
Another reason we’re happy to work with Marco, Farad Group General Manager Daniel Capocci and the Farad organisation: It’s a certified B-Corp, a global network of 4,000 companies as diverse as Ben & Jerry’s, Danone and Patagonia across 150 industries in 74 countries (three of them in the grand duchy) that share a unifying goal of balancing purpose and profit – “legally required to consider the impact of their decisions on their workers, customers, suppliers, community and the environment.”
We’ve launched the certification process and hope to earn B-Corp designation ourselves by the end of the year. After all, what’s not to love about using “business as a force for good” as B-Corp puts it?
It might be utopian and a touch naive, but I hope that one day every company in the world will be driven by that sentiment.
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