What are the odds … you walk into class in the very first week of your time at university – and the first person you would talk to is the one co-founding a start-up for sustainable finance with you 18 years down the road? Call it serendipity, but this is the story of Carl and René, co-founders of Echo.
After graduating, they first set-out to work in different fields. Carl became an economist and philosopher, René focused on International Affairs. Yet they always kept in touch.
Over time, there was one recurring topic in their talks: how to make finance sustainable and social? How to make sure investments have maximum impact? What they were looking for was better impact data to know who the “good guys” in business are. Frustrated with intransparent ESG ratings and greenwashing in impact investment, they came up with an idea: An impact trading platform to measure the social impact of private companies. From there on, they were Echo – the world’s first impact exchange.
At Echo, everybody gets a say. René and Carl might be co-founders, but it is your voice – and your voice alone – that matters for impact rating on Echo. You decide by your trades. Based on the data created by Echo, people can reliably put the money where the impact is. And René and Carl finally get to work together each day. For them, it almost feels like freshman’s year over again.
Curious about Echo Impact Exchange?
Echo is a trading platform for impact rating. That’s right: you can rate companies’ impact by trading their impact certificates. Joining Echo is free for the time being and the profits you make from trading will become convertible to other currencies in 2023!
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