Sustainable investing — why we invested in Grünfin

Recycling your rubbish, go vegan, take a bus. We’ve all agreed to make small changes and adjust our lifestyle to stop harming the planet. And meanwhile, when you are ordering that oat cappuccino, your savings (the money that is investing in the future you) is investing in oil. Isn’t that ironic?

Please don’t stop reading! We know you just want to hit the snooooooze button when starting to hear a lecture on savings, but this is one of the most important — and green — choices you can make throughout your lifetime. In fact, shifting your savings to sustainable assets has more than 20x higher CO2 impact than stopping eating meat and flying — combined!

Ever heard the expression, money makes the world go round? It is true and it is exactly why impact investing is so important. You can support more sustainable businesses by increasing their access to capital so that they can further invest in growth and innovation, while decreasing access to capital for businesses that pollute our planet. It is crazy that in 2020, more than 200 billion dollars every year are still invested in fossil fuels and coal.

Sounds like a no brainer? So why aren’t more people switching to impact investing?

One reason is that historically there has been a perception that sustainable investments have a lower financial potential, you sacrifice returns for impact. It is rather the opposite as companies that have focused on sustainability consistently outperform traditional assets.

But still, sustainable investing is not easy and there are a myriad of standards, indexes and asset classes on the market that are not easy to grasp if you do not spend a lot of time digging into the details. We believe this is a key reason why so few switch to impact investing — it is too complex and scary!

This is the problem our latest investment Grünfin wants to fix — investing according to your values should be as easy as choosing not to eat meat or taking the bike instead of the car. They have developed an investment platform that makes it easy to invest based on your values such as climate, health or equality. All this is done for a low fixed fee, without the typical hidden fees you find in the banking world, and with incentives that are 100% aligned with their customers.

Triin, Karin and Alvar and the rest of the fantastic team at Grünfin have combined their great experience from (fin)tech unicorns and traditional banking to help private customers do what they do, shift their investment mindset from risk-return to risk-return-impact. Their first product is targeting parents saving for their children so that they have a great starting point in their adult life financially but also hopefully a society and planet that is still great to live in.

Grünfin’s and Norrsken VC’s missions are so aligned that we couldn’t be more excited and proud to be part of this journey — sustainable investments is the key to a sustainable future both for people and planet and should be available for everyone!

A warm welcome to the Norrsken VC family!