Ryan Grant Little: 0:42

Welcome to Another Climate Tech Podcast, interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Do you know where your money is? But, like, do you really know? I was astounded by some of the facts I discovered as I researched this episode. If you've got a chunk of cash sitting in a bank, you might be doubling your carbon footprint if you're not aware of how that bank is investing your money. Dan Sherrard- Smith is a Welsh tech entrepreneur who's helping companies and individuals to find bank accounts and pension plans that aren't financing oil and gas and other harmful industries. I reached Dan at home in Bratislava. I'm Ryan Grant Little. Thanks for joining Dan. Welcome to the podcast, ryan. Really great to be here. Your CV reads you're a tech guy, but with the social bent, and I wonder if you could talk a bit about your background and how it led up to founding my mother tree and what that is, and I also want you to include the part about having built the startup that got the best ever deal on, presumably UK Dragons Den.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 1:44

Yeah, it was UK, UK Dragon Den. Good to clarify. Yes, in my background, I started my career at Ovo Energy having studied history in French, and absolutely zero to do with what I've ended up doing.

Ryan Grant Little: 1:57

I have a French degree too. We're probably the only two people who have jobs that are not French teacher or French translator, that are French degrees.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 2:10

Exactly so yeah, I started at Ovo Energy on their grad scheme, which was great because I just got to sort of hop around different departments and understand how that business works, and ended up on the team called Ovo Communities which was launching local energy companies. So local generation, local employment. That built on Ovo's infrastructure and just loved the entrepreneurial aspect of it. I think you probably call that an intrapreneur, which that term didn't exist back then, but that was what I was doing. I just got kind of hooked on answering big questions. So, left Ovo, launched a charity called Good Company, which I ran for 18 months which was connecting volunteers with the elderly, and ultimately that business didn't work out. We actually ended up giving most of the funding back because we didn't hit the targets we wanted to hit. It's quite rare for a charity to give the funding back.

Ryan Grant Little: 2:57

It's quite weird to have the funding left to give back in that situation.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 3:02

Well, there is that as well and then it was headhunted by a team at that time called the Big Deal and the original two founders had this idea for something called Look After my Bills. They basically said let you go and launch it. So I became the third sort of founder of that and ran that on my own for six months, proving the concept. We were also switching people's energy, so whenever your bill went up we'd automatically switch you to a better deal in the UK. We got into Y Combinator after about eight months of that for Look After my Bills and then about a year in we had the best ever deal on Dragonstone for Look After my Bills. So that was the Dragon's Den experience and all five dragons actually bid for the company and all of them bid three times over, which you don't get in the edit. You get 15 of what happened on the final edit and that company just really went like a rocket ship. We went from zero to 100,000 customers in about 18 months. We ended up just shy of a million customers when we sold and we saved the British public 127 million pounds in three years. So a real amazing journey and towards the end of my time at Look After my Builds, it become a very, very comfortable job. We were. We were making eight figures a year revenue and just started thinking, well, what's next?

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 4:19

And for me a couple of things really came together at that point. So the first is my wife was pregnant. I've now got a two-year-old son and I know at some point he's going to ask me what did I do when I realized the extent to the climate crisis? And I want to be able to tell him I did all I could with the skills that I had. So that was the real lightning rod moment. But actually the story goes a bit further back. So when I was, I grew up in Wales the original Wales as opposed to New South Wales in Australia, but the original Wales in a city called Swansea and just fell in love with the beaches there. So it's on the coast. And at 12 years old, sitting in a geography lesson, I realized, you know, hearing about climate change for the first time, I realized that without dramatic change we were going to lose that part of the world. And there's been more profound wake-up calls since, but that was the first time and I didn't know what to do about it then.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 5:06

But that sort of came back into my life as my son was born, and those were rooted in motivations for launching Mother Tree and to your second part of that question sort of around Mother Tree. So at that time this is about two years ago I just started interviewing people about their experience of the climate crisis and what they were doing and then running focus groups. And then my wife came up with the idea to run something called the Climate Challenge, which was groups of about eight people enough to share a pizza over 30 days, just trying different tasks to be more sustainable. We looked at our carbon footprint, we got rid of our single-use plastic, we went vegan for the day, and two tasks more than anything else really stood out.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 5:44

So when we realized where our banks were investing and where our pensions were invested and for me included, right the first time I went through the challenge these were new tasks for me I realized 2% of my pension was in BP and Shell, so in oil and gas, 1% was in British American tobacco, 1% was in weapons just things that I'd never choose to invest in and every month some of my cash had been going there and at the same time, looked at where look after my bills bank account was, and that was with Lloyds, and Lloyds have put £12 billion into fossil fuels since 2016,. Like over a billion pounds a year, and that was really the start of Mother Tree. So we built what is possibly the world definitely the UK's first and only money carbon calculator. Should we show businesses and consumers the carbon impact of their money and then we work with them to make it really easy to get to greener providers?

Ryan Grant Little: 6:41

And so it sounds like. I mean, the through line here is that you're actually using the same business model that you would use to reduce energy bills now with bank accounts basically, and in this case it's not just about getting the better deal, but it's about getting the better kind of carbon deal for the world, so to speak.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 6:59

Exactly so. We cover and it's for businesses more than consumers this time but we cover current account savings accounts, pensions, investments, insurance and energy. And, yes, we look at cash position, so can we get the business a saving? We look at the carbon reduction and it's huge for businesses when they look at the cash. But we also look at values, so can we support biodiversity, Can we reduce the gender pay gap, those kind of things. But, yes, very similar business model to look after my bills.

Ryan Grant Little: 7:28

Okay and that's interesting that it's more for businesses, and it resonated with me. I had a SaaS company a few years ago and one of the first things I did when I stepped in as the CEO is to ditch Deutsche Bank, which has a very bad record, and to switch to someone else. And for that I wasn't looking at the, you know, I wasn't even thinking about the carbon side. I was thinking about, well, all the kind of the oligarchs and Donald Trump and that type of thing. Back then in the late 2010s. They're in Germany, in Berlin, where I was, there was definitely no calculator to use at that time, so I used your calculator and tried something out.

Ryan Grant Little: 8:04

So I know that Barclays, because we, as you see, name names on this podcast. I know Barclays has a bad record and so I tried. You know what, if my business had 100,000 pounds in an account, what would that look like? And I was. I mean, I expected, you know it to be bad, but it's much worse than I thought. And so putting 100,000 pounds in a Barclays current account is the equivalent of 23 tons of CO2 per year, which adds up to 120 return flights from London to Rome, which is astronomical, and yeah, so where's that carbon coming from? How are you making these calculations? Talk a little bit about what's under the hood.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 8:43

Yeah, absolutely so. The way we look at carbon for banks is we look at the bank's own reports, so what you call sort of scope one and two, and they report a little bit on scope three, so it's their own operations plus their supply chain. But we also look at where the bank is investing, so pulling on publicly available data, but also looking at trading platforms so we can see where the bank's lending money. We're able to build up a really clear it's always an estimation for these things but a really clear estimation of where the bank is putting its money and what that means in terms of carbon impact.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 9:18

And then, once we have a view of okay, so this bank has a overall carbon footprint of, let's say it's 100 tons, and we know how much you have within that bank. Let's say you have a pound in a current account and let's say that bank has 100 pounds of assets. So we say, well, you're responsible for one over 100 of that, because if you withdraw it, that bank loses some of its power, that bank loses some of its assets. And so one over 100, that's a percent. So therefore we attribute a percent of their carbon footprint to you. So that is how we calculate it, and that's how we get to those numbers.

Ryan Grant Little: 9:51

And with the calculator it was displayed to me that if I went with triotos or cooperative or kind of one of these more social banks, that I can be saving up to 80% of that carbon by investing with that. Is that because they're not investing in fossil fuels? Is that the main driver?

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 10:06

Exactly so. We look beyond fossil fuels. We look at many, many different sectors. But yes, those banks have refused to invest in fossil fuels, just one of their policies. Which means when we look at their carbon footprint, it's dramatically lower than a Barclays or an HSBC.

Ryan Grant Little: 10:22

Have any of the banks that you've named positively or negatively reached out to you? I'm wondering if you have any interesting stories. In working with these banks, do you see some that are trying to do better, some that are just kind of sticking to the same line that they've always kind of worked on? So I think it's really interesting.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 10:39

We've had engagement from the sort of mid-sized banks and the smaller banks, really really positive discussions around what can they do, also with some banks around being more transparent. So there was a couple of banks who were on the table, who hadn't published their carbon footprint in a clear way, who have now done that, which we think is absolutely brilliant progress. The bigger banks they haven't engaged. We're probably a fly in their ointment at this point, but what we want to do is talk the big banks language. So if we can get enough people moving money, enough businesses moving money out of Barclays, then suddenly we're talking the chairman's language and he will sit up and take notice. But I think, while we remain small, I suspect Barclays will continue to put to the region of 10 to 20 billion into fossil fuels every year.

Ryan Grant Little: 11:29

So you're kind of leading like a new iteration of the divest movement and rather than encouraging people to divest directly in fossil fuels, you're encouraging people to divest from the banks who invest in fossil fuels.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 11:42

Exactly. And the reason we do that is because when we look at the amount of money banks put into fossil fuel expansion, it's extortionate. So I'll just give you one stat the world's 60 biggest banks put 50 times more into fossil fuel expansion than the fossil fuel companies themselves. Wow, to put that another way for every pound that BP and Shell put to fossil fuel expansion, the banks put 50 pounds Wow In a divestment works if you can remove the cash that they can't replace. A one to 50 ratio is very hard to replace for any company.

Ryan Grant Little: 12:16

And what about the businesses that you're targeting as customers? So I would imagine I mean, I can't see a lot of objections from their side because they're not giving up much and they're gaining a lot, while also being able to talk to their customers about making these positive changes and ultimately, for their scope three emissions as well, it's going to be positive, absolutely.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 12:35

Well, we're very exclusive of who we work with. So we only work with values led organizations. We turn businesses away that we don't think are going to make the changes. So we absolutely are exclusive because we're judged on our results. And, yeah, in terms of what the business gets out of it, we've seen happier employees, happier clients and actually, for some businesses we've even unlocked more investment. The way we do that, we work with the business to understand where they currently are in terms of their banks and their pensions and so forth. We uncover areas where they can make additional savings and unlock higher savings rates. We're also then able to reduce their biggest source of carbon emissions and have a proof point that this business is truly values led, because they're making sure they're investing in the values that they really support. And then we publicize that for the business. We make a really big message about it at the off-sites, on media channels, to make sure this business is really known as someone who does what they say they're going to do.

Ryan Grant Little: 13:33

You say that one of the better ways to know if a bank is greenwashing or not is to look at how much they invest in renewable energy versus fossil fuels, and again so Barclays comes to the top of the list as doing a piss-poor job there, with 98% fossil fuels to their 2% renewable energy investments. Who's doing a good job of this? You can go ahead and name some names of banks, and I wonder also so I know the calculators UK focused right now do you have any plans for the rest of us who don't live in the UK to expand so that we can take part in greening our bank accounts as well?

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 14:08

Well, I love that question. Yes, two things here. First is yes, we have plans to be broader than the UK. In fact, we already are. So we work with businesses all over the world. We have businesses in Canada, in Denmark, in Sweden, in Australia, all over the world, and our research is global. The website currently has the table for the UK, but there are absolutely plans to publish tables in the future. It's just down to resource and focus and where our clients are will continue to publish data. The second part, in terms of those ratios who are the good banks? We're in the UK, treados, the cooperative, nationwide Virgin Money. There's quite a few banks who are refusing to invest in fossil fuels, so their ratio is 100% to zero when you look at fossil fuel versus renewable investment.

Ryan Grant Little: 15:00

That's awesome. One of the other areas, so it's not just bank accounts, it's also pensions. I love this statement that's right front and center on your website, which is my mother tree, which is that my bank account and pension combined could have doubled the carbon impact of going vegan, quitting flying and choosing to ride a bike over or driving a car combined. What role is the bank? What role is the pension? How can people, individuals influence where their pension is invested? Right now, it's a great question.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 15:32

The business is when you look at where their cash is stored. Just with the banks, it's their biggest source of carbon emissions. Let's take Google. Google have 130 billion pounds in cash. Wonderful problems they have. That cash is stored in just a few banks and, based on how those banks invest, that cash has a carbon footprint. That carbon footprint is actually double the carbon footprint of Google's carbon footprint for their entire supply chain. For Apple, it's 3.9 times bigger than their reported carbon emissions. For the average UK company, which has about 10 employees, it's double. They have a typical carbon footprint of about 75 tons. When you add in just their cash, it adds another 75 tons. When you add in pensions for the average UK company, it adds another 41 tons. Pensions and cash together are a huge amount more than all other activities put together for a business. Very similar for the consumer, but it's flipped around. The bigger carbon footprint is on their pensions and then an additional piece on their banks. Those two things together for the average UK consumer is about 10 tons. For all other actions put together for the average UK consumer, it's 10 tons. It's a huge difference we can make just by making sure pensions and banks are in the right place In terms of how can we influence the pension discussion.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 16:54

Two things First, figure out what kind of pension you have. If you have a pension that is invested in the stock market, then you can actively change that pension. It has to be at the right risk level for you and make sure you get financial advice on that. Once you know what kind of pension you have, find out where it's being invested. There are websites out there which will show you the top 10 companies that you're invested in for any given fund. You start to build up a picture of okay, I know I'm invested in BP, or I know I'm invested in mining, or maybe that's Amazon. You will find out If you're not happy with where it is. Shameless plug. Come and talk to Mother Tree. Also, talk to a financial expert and see if there's something that they can do in terms of making sure that pension is invested into a world you actually want to retire into.

Ryan Grant Little: 17:41

Pensions have so much power. They have so many assets under management. I've said this before, that pension fund managers and boards could be the superheroes of the climate change story the most boring superheroes, but still the superheroes of the story. I think it's going to take a lot of pressure from the pension holders. There's so much distance between the average person with a pension and the people making decisions at the board level. Still there's actually no reason for that. We can facilitate that. I think that this is probably something that's very much on the roadmap for you. If I look at what you're doing, Absolutely yes.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 18:20

We work with companies and individuals to make sure their pension is not only where they want it to be from a returns perspective, but also where they want it to be from a what kind of world do we want to get perspective?

Ryan Grant Little: 18:31

Speaking of what kind of world we want to get. I get the sense from reading some of the stuff you've put online that, although you're kind of probably banging your head in frustration and looking at a lot of this kind of stuff every day, you're quite an optimist in the end. What makes you optimistic?

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 18:47

I'd say I'm a kind of realist and an optimist. I think what makes me optimistic the people I talk to every day in terms of you know, I talk to some incredible people founders, sustainability officers, people who are genuinely willing to make a difference in terms of their own influence, and that is incredible to hear and understand. You know why they're doing it. Often it's they've had kids. You know they've got kids, or you know they've really thought about what the world's going to be like in 20 years and they want to make a difference in the way that they can. I love that.

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 19:19

The other thing that makes me optimistic is, you know, realizing actually, with banks and pensions, we've probably found the main two levers we really need to pull to get us on track for a world that is genuinely healthy and vibrant for everybody in the next 30 years. If we can get the funding to the right place and we already know the solutions to get us out of the mess If we can get up the funding to those solutions, then suddenly this whole world, this whole sort of story we're being sold by the media that we're having, we are in climate disaster and we are in that suddenly that picture starts to change just by changing banks and pensions.

Ryan Grant Little: 19:56

I love the focus, I love how easy it is and it's just about getting the word out and basically making these changes that don't cost anything for people and don't necessarily change anything of their lifestyle. It's not like giving up a car you know, it's nothing. There's no downside to this, so I love it. I'm looking forward to seeing it expand globally. What's the best place for people to find you online if they want to get in touch?

Dan Sherrard-Smith: 20:20

So, head to the website. It's mymothertreecom. Or feel free to drop me an email, dan, at mymothertreecom. And LinkedIn also a good place. I think I'm the only Dan Sherrod Smith. Type that in and have me on.

Ryan Grant Little: 20:33

LinkedIn. I'll put in the show notes as well, dan. Thanks a lot, ryan. Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch any time with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.