Bertrand Gacon started his career in the Investment Banking arm of BNP Paribas in 1997 in Singapore, before joining the Wealth Management business line in Paris. In 2003, Bertrand moved to Geneva where he created the Responsible Investments offering of the French bank, designing innovative investment solutions for the bank’s clients. He then worked for Lombard Odier, as Head of Responsible and Impact Investing, a capacity that led him to create different investment strategies with a specific focus on Development Finance and Green Bonds.
Bertrand is now the co-founder and CEO of IMPAAKT, a social business that uses a collaborative approach to measure the impact that businesses have on the world.
Moneys Magazine met Bertrand at Fongit in Geneva.
Bertrand, tell us more about you and your background.
I have been working in the Sustainable Finance industry for almost 20 years. I created and led this offering at several large European banks such as BNP Paribas and Lombard Odier. We developed and managed sustainable funds and impact investing products, and worked at integrating environmental and social decisions into the mainstream investment process. During all these years, I have always been frustrated with the relevance and quality of the sustainability data we had access to. So we decided to build our own solution, using a collaborative, community-based approach
When was your company born and who is your core team?
The company was launched in Sept. 2019 together with my co-founder Sylvain Massot. We built up a very robust and scalable platform and gather a community of almost 50.000 contributors who work together to document, analyze and assess the many positive and negative impacts that businesses have on the planet and society. The Impaakt team now comprises of 28 sustainability enthusiasts and experts based in 6 different countries. The Fantastic Team!
How did you scale your company to the actual size?
Initially, we mainly focused on building the platform and the community. We did so by raising funds from mission-aligned investors who financed the upfront investments. Now, we have a fully operational and highly scalable platform that contains more than 25,000 impact notes on 3,000 companies from all over the world. Now that we have reached this critical mass we are working on the monetization of our solutions and additional fundraising rounds to move to the next level.
Next step?
Beef up our sales team, expand our coverage to 10,000 companies and quickly grow our annual recurring revenues to EUR 5M. This will be done by completing our current offering focused on Wealth Managers to serve Institutional Asset Managers and Corporates.
