Episode 82: Topofinance: How banking is the secret to gigantic climate action

And these are corporate treasurers for large international corporations who they know that the bank is safe and they put their money in the bank.

But then they never think about what happens to it after that. just sort of disappears into this black box. And that black box happens to be the thing that's the invisible hand of the climate crisis.  

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. 

This week I’m excited to talk about one of the more interesting climate solutions I have heard about in a VERY long time the easiest possible thing you could do to have a HUGE impact is just to move your money to banks that don’t use your deposits to fund carbon-intensive industries. And if you and I can have a huge impact doing that imagine what would happen if a corporation did it. 

Let’s walk through it together, shall we?   

Paul 

My name is Paul Moinester. I'm the founder and executive director of a nonprofit called Topo Finance. We help organizations, companies, and individuals leverage their overlooked but perhaps most powerful climate superpower, which is their banking and investing.

Molly Wood 

So this is the part where I have to tell everybody like, I've talked to Paul a couple of times and each time the scope and opportunity here blew my mind. talk about the overlooked opportunity, which is your banking and how that has climate impact. Cause that is not an obvious one-to-one.

Paul 

Yeah, so historically we've always treated our banking and investing as a climate neutral activity. We haven't thought about it even as having a climate impact and that's existed because sort of one, which is we don't understand some of the fundamental aspects of this, which is when you go and you put your money in a bank, your money doesn't just sit there in a vault. The banks take that money and they lend it out across the economy and that has a massive, massive emissions footprint.

And the second reason is that there hasn't been any real transparency into what that footprint actually is. And so, I I talked to corporate treasurers of the largest companies in the world and to a company, they haven't understood the fact that they're banking and investing actually. And this is what our research has shown is generating more emissions than everything else they're doing as a company combined. Nor do they frankly understand why that's happening. And so often when I bring this to people, they think it's, because you know, you know, energy storage or everything that's doing from all the electronic transfers and the payment systems and it's like no, 100 % it's coming from what they're doing with your money when they lend it out and actually bank submissions from their lending is 700 times more carbon intensive than everything else they do combined.

Molly Wood 

So let's sort of keep specifying this because I think people are probably listening thinking like, are you talking about them literally driving stacks of cash around? what are they? So exactly, and that is not what we mean, right? Like we should get familiar with scope one, two and three if you're not already, most people are, but how does the draw that super bright line? How does lending create an emissions impact?

Paul 

Pretty much, yeah.

Paul

Sure. when you put your money in the bank, the bank lends about 90 % of that money out. And that is going to everything across the economy. It's going to mortgages, it's going to small business loans, depending, and this varies a tremendous amount based on where you bank. But for the largest banks in the world, the big Wall Street banks, as well as the large super regional banks in the United States, about 20 to 30 % of that money is being lent to the world's most carbon-intensive sectors. So that's energy, industrial manufacturing, agriculture, et cetera. And so those activities are generating a lot of emissions within themselves, obviously. And so if you just take this and you sort of bring it down to a bank by bank level, you can figure out what that emissions footprint is. And that's a lot of the work that we do. And there's about, you know, sort of a community bank in the United States versus a big Wall Street bank, the emissions profile is about five times higher at a big Wall Street bank than what it would be in a community bank, meaning your emissions could be 80 % low. Like there's basically an 80 % spread depending on where you're banking and what their emissions are from how they're taking your money and lending it out.

Molly Wood 

Right, so we might be sitting here composting and never buying new clothes and participating in the circular economy and reducing our carbon and driving electric and whatever. But meanwhile, our money is just straight up financing a coal plant, let's say.

Paul 

Yeah, exactly. And that's what's really fascinating about this is that we sort of joke that while you're sleeping, your banking and investing is oftentimes undermining all of the things that you're doing while you're awake as an environmentally minded consumer. I want to be clear, you know, and I know this is, you know, it's, I know you've talked about this in the past, and we've talked about this about not putting the onus on individuals of saying like making them feel guilty about all of this, but when you go and you look at the indicative emissions footprint, and I use the word indicative because this isn't a direct one-to-one per year scope three comment, but if you have, let's just say, $10,000 in a Wall Street bank, that's generating about three tons of emissions per year, which is substantial. We use these terms tons a lot, right? So to be clear, that's 6200 metric tons, so it's like 6200 pounds of emissions a year.

And that's comparable to about driving 10,000 miles in your car. And so the emissions benefit of moving from a traditional ICE vehicle to an EV is about 3.1 tons of emissions production per year and just $10,000 sitting in your bank. And so we estimate, based on our math, that if you were to move about $5,000 from a carbon-intensive bank to a more responsible green bank, like a community bank, the emissions reduction from that is larger on an annual basis than going vegan.

Molly Wood 

Wow, okay, so one easy hack for individuals where this seems like it really starts to have impact obviously is at the corporate level and that's what Topo Finance is targeting, right?

Paul 

Yeah, I mean, the story that I always tell about all of this is that my background's not in finance and so there's a whole other tale to that. But this isn't stuff that sort of came naturally to me or stuff that I worked on and I was learning about all of this and I was, you know, sort of

If Bill McKibbin is telling me, Paul, that Where I Bank Matters and I run a small nonprofit and I have a few thousand dollars in the bank, not that that doesn't matter, but what does that mean for the biggest companies in the world, like Microsoft and Apple or Google, who measure their money and the tens of billions of dollars? And so we set out on a research project to understand if we could actually measure those emissions, how big they are, how they compare to their other emission sources, and then if we could tie it back to their corporate sustainability goals. And what we found wasmuch to the surprise of all of these companies and to us frankly that the banking and investing of companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Salesforce, Netflix, etc. are generating more emissions than everything else those companies are doing combined, Scope 1, 2 and 3, which includes the use of all their products. So me using an Apple laptop for this interview, those count as part of Apple's emissions. So the use of all Apple products globally are generating less emissions than their banking and investing, which they had never even paid attention to.

Molly Wood 

Are they, I'm not trying to put you on the spot here, but like, they paying attention now? Is this an active conversation at some of these companies? Right.

Paul 

Next question. Yes. It's a no, this is I mean, but this is what we do right. And and I guess with like a tremendous amount of compassion and that we work with companies, we've got Patrick Flynn, who's the former head of sustainability at Salesforce, who's on our team now. And when we met him initially, because we brought this to Salesforce. And at the time, the data said it was something like 91 percent or new data says higher. And we brought it to him and his head kind of exploded when we were like, you know, by the way.

If you thought about this, he was like, no, we've never thought about it. like, well, we measured it. It's pretty big. You should care about it. And they're like, how big is it? And we told them and they could sort of see their jaws hit the floor. so that hasn't been the response, I would say, of all corporate sustainability leaders. But it's something that think companies are, it's something that companies are increasingly waking up to. And it's the work that we're doing with companies is to get them to understand this. And I say this with a tremendous amount of sympathy that they have these incredibly challenging jobs and everything that they're working on is they're sort of stuck in these impossible positions where, you know, for the general public that cares about the stuff, they're not going far enough, oftentimes within their own companies, their prize for pushing the envelope too much. But the what we've been building a whole sort of coalition of companies that are really excited about this and who see the opportunity to not only advance their global ambitions, but also to really help clean up what they're trying to achieve because now that they understand the fact that their banks are undermining their own climate goals and objectives because what they're doing and what they're trying to do from emissions reduction is so tied to the macro lens of what their banks are doing, they're starting to engage with their banks and move them all forward on this.

Molly Wood 

Yeah, totally. I mean, and I would imagine almost every company seems to define their chief sustainability officer role slightly differently, but very few of them seem to have treasury and treasury management under their purview. Like it's just a, it's like you have first to get people across the knowledge gap before they can even investigate alternatives, right?

Paul 

Yeah, I mean, we, so, I mean, last year we engaged with companies and organizations with over $600 billion in cash and investments. And of all the companies that we engaged with, there was only one that was working on this before we actually started talking to them. I bet you, Molly, you probably know who it is, but audience won't be surprised to learn that it was Patagonia that was actually doing this long before we ever talked to them.

And so we've been able to work with them and sort of bring some of our data and stuff to their work. But no company that we've talked to that would be like a large publicly traded company was working in the US or in Europe was working on this, had an understanding of how carbon intensive their banking and investing was. One of the big challenges that you mentioned is this creating alignment of bringing the sustainability and treasury teams together and getting them to think about this in a shared language of sustainability people learning how the finance function works, the finance function, thinking about this has the sustainability team, you know, terms of what their ambitions and goals are around it. And so there's a lot of just sort of baselining there around what the goals are, what the, and like how you go about doing this in a way where you're adding an impact. Like we're not going in and telling companies like you need to break up with your bank. You need to divest from this to that. It's really about trying to get them to understand how to.

add an impact lens to their financial management while keeping an eye on their core responsibility, is return security and liquidity.

Molly Wood 

Let's before we get to kind of how to solve at the either corporate or individual level How how is this being accounted for it seems like a big? A big thing that's happening here is that right now? This is not necessarily a part of a company's scope three emissions reporting because if it were like They would have been aware

Paul 

Yes, definitely. so when we set out on this project, we started talking to the folks who run the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, WRI. when we started talking to them, basically what we were told was, we've always thought this was in scope, but we've never had the data or methodology to require companies to report this. And so they were very excited to connect with us because we were sort of bringing that data methodology to the table. And so...

It's that process of amending the greenhouse gas protocol and defining this in scope. And for those Scope 3 nerds out there, this is all Scope 3 category 15. ~~That process is a challenging one and it's become increasingly challenging because of sort of the global everything that's happening. I mean, this is like the wonkiest stuff that I'm sure your audience's eyes are glazing over listening to what's happening. All right. And so we're not sure what's going to come out of that process, but we have, we know that increasingly they're thinking about this as part of being in scope for companies.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, more on the specifics of how this could all work and how weirdly it’s the thing that could actually just poof into existence all the money we keep saying we need for global decarbonization. 

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We’re talking with Paul Moinester of Topofinance about the surprisingly underestimated climate problem of banking. 

Molly Wood 

Long time listeners of this show will know that this is like financial supply chains is a thing I'm very interested in. We've talked about retirement, you know, the retirement plans that companies offer and how there's like a lot of hidden emissions there. But it's kind of interesting because this, the lens you're putting on it is like specific to companies and consumers without saying divestment.

Right? Because there is kind of this move toward like, well, we should ask banks to divest from these projects or whatever. And you're kind of saying like, banks get a bank, we could starve them of funds. A little bit. Is that the way to look at it or?

Paul 

Well, I mean, it's so what I would I would put out and put it in a slightly different term, which is so divestment, which is about moving your money away from something. Right. So there was like divestment in South Africa years ago. But what we're talking about more in this context is divestment from fossil fuels. Everything has a carbon footprint associated with it and all of it needs to be decarbonized. And so we paint it more broadly, which is to say, even if you have if you're a foundation that's divested from fossil fuels, you're still generating a lot of emissions through what you're doing. And so the way that we look at this is there's sort of three broad buckets of things that need to be happening, which is one, to your point, banks need to be ramping down their investments in fossil fuels. Two, they need to be ramping up their investments in climate solutions. And then three, they need to be decarbonizing everything else. And so there's a great statistic that Bloomberg the research team has around the fact that the goal is by 2030 that banks should be putting $4 of investments into green energy for every dollar into dirty energy that they're putting in, in order for us to keep track with our global climate goals, which we're already way far behind on. But in 2023, I think the number was, we were like 0.89 to one. So we were like... a fourth of the way to where we need to go in the next five years from a bank side of this all. And so we look at this through a lot of different lenses and we try to treat it more holistically, especially in the current context where ramping down the investments is particularly challenging. It ramped down investments in climate solutions. And so where we really tend to focus is more on the ramping up the climate solutions and decarbonizing everything else.

And for fear of drowning on here, I think it's important to kind of maybe paint a picture of sort of like what the bigger vision and all of this is. So we took a very, like, very esoteric view, essentially, of this, which was saying, like, could we figure out a way because we've known for a while that banks were

Paul 

driving climate change, they were lending money to fossil fuels at historic rates. think the number of something like the 60 largest banks in the world have put around $7 trillion into fossil fuel investments since the Paris agreement was signed in 2015. But what we didn't have was a way to sort of bring this down to the individual level. So with our data and research, it's not just a macro story. We can go in and we can tell companies, hey, by banking with this bank, this is what your money is doing. By banking with this bank, this is what it could be doing that's better.

We can do the same thing with individuals and we have a calculator that I should have mentioned before on our website if you go to [topofinance.org](http://topofinance.org/) slash calculator where you can measure the emissions that stem from your banking and see what switching to a greener bank would look like. But when we zoom out, what this actually is really pointing to is this very unsexy topic that we have now sort of dedicated our lives doing, which is the greatest need in our opinion for innovation that needs to happen to not only mitigate the climate challenge, really add and create the resilience in the economy and the resilience and the adaptation of people's lives that we need. The innovation that's needed most in all of that is actually financial. It's not technological. We have the technology that we need to achieve a lot of our goals, but what we don't have is financial infrastructure that will allow us to actually flow capital towards climate solutions at the speed and scale that we need. And so by bringing this to companies and saying, okay,

Molly Wood 

Mm-hmm.

Paul

think about your banking and investing as a climate solution, it's not just your money in the bank. So many of these companies have stocks and fixed income products and everything else. then, so if you look at the balance sheet of a large company like Google, what you actually see is, if you look at it through my weird eyes, is actually a roadmap for how do you decarbonize the planet, right? It's actually, it's treasury bonds. So what's the US government, a treasury bond is just as carbon intensive as essentially a dollar in a Chase bank account.

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Paul 

which is about, just for the numbers, about 300,000 metric tons of emissions per year, per billion dollars.

Molly Wood 

because the money in the treasury bond is then turning, it is turned around and used to finance these carbon intensive projects or sectors, everything, yeah. Yeah.

Paul 

And everything across the economy, right? And so you look at muni bonds, muni bonds are really carbon intensive because what are they being used for? They're being used to build roads and a lot of other infrastructure. You have mortgage-backed securities. They're a lot less carbon intensive, but they're also still carbon intensive. And so you have corporate debt securities. And so if you look at all of these assets and say, how do we build green variations of them? What you're actually looking at is you take mortgage-backed securities. Well, what would a green mortgage-backed security look like that would incentivize the

Molly Wood

Right.

Paul 

decarbonization of existing housing stock or the decarbonization of housing stock. are some, but they don't exist at scale. But these companies will have billions of dollars in these financial products and no green alternatives exist. And so the world in which we're trying to create is more, it's less about creating infrastructure. And this brings me back to like my early days in my career working at the Department of Transportation, but it's like, how do we build

the roads and the plumbing and the sewer systems and all of the like unseen aspects that we need to be able to flow capital towards solutions at scale. And so that's where the innovation is needed.

Molly Wood 

It's so interesting because, well, it's so interesting because we are sort of constantly saying we need $7 trillion, right? We need three to $5 trillion to decarbonize the economy. And then we go like, we don't have that money. And then it turns out that that money, I mean, I don't know if anybody ever listened to that old, I think it was Planet Money episode of like, they could talk about the giant pool of money. There is a giant pool of money and it's ours, right? It's individual money or it's company money.

And it's sitting there. so when you hear that a bank has loaned $7 trillion, 60 banks have, it's your money, or it's company's money. And so the idea of redirecting that, I just wanna continue to refine what you're saying. The idea of redirecting that to banks that are specifically committed to funding green projects means that you, company or person,

Paul 

Exactly.

Molly Wood

are funding that. You are creating a new pool of money. You are redirecting the giant pool of money in the way that we want it to go. Yep.

Paul 

Yes, exactly. funny enough on the $7 trillion. So there's $7 trillion in corporate cash and investments based on our last calculation that we did in 2024. And that $7 trillion is generating emissions that are equivalent of 20 % of all emissions in the United States. And that's just corporate cash alone. That's not counting foundations, universities, etc., or our own individual money. And so when you take a look at it, and not to pick on Microsoft,

Molly Wood

Right, right.

Paul 

I just it's an easy example, but they're a great company that's doing a lot of climate leading work. But Microsoft has this billion dollar climate innovation fund where they've set a billion dollars aside and they said, we're going to invest in innovation and try to solve all of these massive problems. But meanwhile, they're sitting on one hundred and thirty billion dollars in their corporate treasury that they've never put a sustainability lens to that ice that's generating more emissions than everything else they're doing combined as a company. And what this work is really doing is sort of starting to

Molly Wood 

Yeah.

Paul

open up the aperture in terms of how we think of our money. The story I always tell about this is for me personally, when I moved to Seattle 10 years ago, I moved to a new apartment and I made sure it was in a walkable neighborhood that had access to transit and had my Energy Star appliances and I went and got my seventh generation soaps and I got used furniture and did all the responsible things, the organic sheets. Then I walked down the street and I opened up an account at Chase because it was my local bank and they had like

Molly Wood 

Great.

Paul 

reward systems and that was by far and away the most important environmental decision that I made and I didn't even think about it. like that's true for so many climate conscious individuals, it's true for so many climate conscious companies, foundations, universities, et cetera. And so what's exciting about this is in these times where I think so many of us are feeling at a loss for like, what can we do? The political situation is a mess. Everything seems to be crumbling around us.

There's this new exciting climate superpower that's been hiding in plain sight this whole time, which is your banking and investing and all the other aspects of your financial supply chain, like your insurance as well.

Molly Wood 

I want to come back to insurance because I can't stop talking about insurance. No one can stop talking about insurance. But let's come down to the individual level for the moment, acknowledging that we're going to talk about corporate alternatives in a second. So you mentioned the calculator, the individual cash calculator, which helps you make your banking emissions more transparent. How then, what comes after that?

Paul 

Yeah, I mean, so one, I'm just going to get this out of the way. I'm not a financial advisor. So this is all climate advice around finance, not financial advice. So please don't take any of this as gospel. so there are a number of banks in this country and there's a lot of resources we have lists. At the end of the calculator is actually a list of them, but just to call out a few, particularly some that are members of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values. so like you've got amalgamated bank in the US and beneficial state bank.

Molly Wood 

Good note.

Paul 

Climate First Bank and then Atmos which is a neo bank so it's an online bank and they're really neat because they actually take 100 % of your money and only lend it out to solar projects. so there's a growing list of alternatives that are out there and then part of the work that we're actually doing because moving your banking can be challenging. here's a kind of give you a crazy stat that I love. I'm going to quiz you here.

Molly Wood

always

Paul 

So, if you're an average American and you buy a car, how long do you own that car as a new car?

Molly Wood 

I'm say five years.

Paul 

It's eight years. But if you buy a house, how long do you own that house?

Molly Wood 

12 years? Hey, okay.

Paul 

13, you're getting close. If you open a primary bank account, how long do you keep that bank account? 17 years. Yeah, so moving banks is, it's a sticky activity and banks do a lot to sort of incentivize that. so part of, and frankly, if you're a large company or you have very complicated finances or you...

Molly Wood 

Yeah, for frickin' ever. Because it is so hard to move. Yeah, okay, uh-huh. Wow.

Paul 

require a lot of services, moving your banking can be hard. so one, it's important to think about this as sort of chunking some of this stuff out and so unbundling some of these things. And so you don't need to think about it as moving like all of your money from bank A to bank B. It could just be, okay, open up a second bank account or if you already have two bank accounts as some people have, like maybe you close one of those and move some of that money to a greener bank. But we're actually working on developing some new fintech products with a company called MaxMyInterest, which I think I may have told you about in a past conversation.

which we're super excited about that allows you to actually layer into your existing bank and actually sweep your money out into greener banks. And so I can get into that more specifically if you want, but there's a whole new innovation that's happening around all this stuff. that's part of what's really exciting about this is it's sort of like the beginning of any new sector. 10 years ago, EV selections were very minimal, but now...

Molly Wood 

Yeah, please do.

Paul 

Every time I feel like I go on the road, I'm seeing a new EV that I've never seen before. And I think we'll see the same thing, sort of a Cambrian explosion of new financial products and services in years to come that have this greener lens to it.

Molly Wood 

Okay, so talk more about, so one alternative is you move to a different bank. You maybe do that in increments, you maybe, you know, kind of like tiptoe into it and then possibly you are lacking some of the benefits that you get with your existing bank. But talk a little more about this new product and this new idea of like redirecting the money that's already maybe sitting in Chase.

Paul 

Yeah, yeah. And the other thing too, sorry, I should have mentioned is engaging with your banks is really important. Treat it like calling a member of Congress, but call your bank. We have information on our website where you can learn about the questions that you should ask them. But being able to signal as a customer that, hey, I'm paying attention to this. I actually had somebody call me the other day from a bank that I work with and I had a conversation about this. And I said, does anybody ever ask you this question before? He was like, I've been working here for years and nobody's ever actually

brought up the climate impact. And I actually had to teach this guy who worked for this bank about the climate impact of their bank. And so this is something that most people within banks are not even thinking about. being able, even if it's just your local branch, like bring this up to them, make sure that they sort of run it up the flagpole. This is a lot of the work that we do with companies, right? They work with all their supply chain partners. And so even if you're leaving a bank,

Molly Wood 

Wow.

Paul 

go tell them that you're leaving their bank because of XYZ, things that you don't like about it. If you're joining a bank, tell them you're joining them because of their better climate practices and policies. And this is just going to reinforce this behavior. And in this moment where sort of anti-ESG fervor and all of that is sweeping the country and they're getting so much pushback from Republican members of state legislatures and all of that, being able to show banks, there is this, even if it's not as loud, but this quiet and actually far bigger demand for greening banking products is incredible.

and Greening Banking Services is incredibly important.

Molly Wood

Yeah, I really cannot emphasize enough the importance of sending those signals at the individual level right now, whether it is to your member of Congress or everywhere that you do business in any way. there, okay, so what are the alternatives then for corporate cash?

Paul (27:45.578)

Yeah, so there's this wonderful Canadian bank. We joke that he's a great banker because he's a Canadian banker and he's nice. And know right now, US-Canada relations, we can't side too much on all of that. But there's this guy named Gary Zermin, who's a former city banker in New York City. And he created this product that we came across called Max my interest and Gary will be the first to tell you that this was something that came up purely around helping people grow their money, make more money and keep their money safer. so cash sweeps are this product where essentially there are a lot of them that are on the market right now, but he has some particular aspects of his that make it safer and better, which I won't bore your audience with. But basically what it does is it takes money that's in your primary bank account. So it would plug in. let's just say you have chase, uh, your

you plug this into your Chase account and then it sweeps money out of your bank in. So FDIC, this is particularly for high net wealth individuals like if or companies, if you have more than $250,000, that's what's protected by insurance. And so the goal from a security standpoint is to never have more than that in the account because if the bank goes belly up, you lose the rest of them. You could in theory lose the rest of that money. So what it does is it breaks it up into $250,000 chunks and moves it across other banks into smaller banks.

What Gary didn't realize at the time was that what he was basically doing was taking money out of banks that have a massive carbon footprint because they're lending money to the fossil fuel industry and other carbon intensive sectors and putting it into banks that are lending that money much more regionally and locally for small business loans and mortgages. And so we're still finally finalizing our calculations. But our estimate, just based on the banks that he already has on his network now, is that you can reduce your emissions by about 60 to 70 percent.

by doing this. so if you have, let's just say $100,000, just easy round numbers, I don't have $100,000 in the bank, which I did, and you move that, so $100,000 in a Chase bank account is gonna generate about 30 tons of emissions, or one of the big Wall Street banks is gonna generate about 30 tons of emissions per year. That's twice the average American's carbon footprint. Just by the very act of plugging in Gary's service and using Macs, you can reduce that.

by probably about 60 % as is. And so what we're working on doing is actually bringing a lot of these greener banks onto the platform and you can get that number up even higher. And so what's great about it is that it's this product that allows you to, it's actually a better financial product. It's more secure, you get a larger return. Like right now he's getting about,

Paul 

three points of interest higher than what you would get in a traditional bank if you just went and opened up a bank account. So he's getting like four and a half percent where most banks are giving around one and a half percent. So you make more money, your money's more secure, and you're reducing your impact by more than half. And what's hilarious about all of this, and I think it speaks to just the power of finance as a solution, is when we went and told Gary about this, he just was like, I had no idea, but this is awesome. And it turns out that Gary unknowingly, I could make a very good data-driven

that unknowingly with this small company that he started that hasn't had billions of dollars of investment or anything like that has been more responsible for reducing global emissions than the entire US EV industry combined. And that's the power of finance.

Molly Wood 

I mean, do you see now? Do you see now audience like this? Literally every time I talk to Paul, I'm just like, everyone needs to know. mean, right? yes, we're talking about solutions, but the knowledge part of this alone is so transformative. I mean, I'm sure it's killing you because you're like, yeah, I live in the future. I already know. Now how do I move it? You know?

Paul 

Well, what's killing me, I mean, to be honest, what's killing me more is like, it's not even that. It's like, how do we scale this? Right? It's still something that's not, and the amount of, yeah, I mean, this is where I put my nonprofit pitch on, but like, if you knew how small our budget was and what this looks like in terms of all of this stuff. And so this is this new part of corporate sustainability, organizational sustainability, individual sustainability, that's super exciting. And my biggest thing is that I just sort of feel like I'm sitting here being like, this could become this next big thing. could become a staple of all of these companies. could be moving trillions of dollars in the economy. And the biggest thing holding it back is like being able to not just get the word out, but like build the practices, build the products, do all the stuff and get the innovation. And meanwhile, I'm seeing money dumped into a lot of stuff that I know is not nearly as impactful. That's what eats me alive more so than anything, to be honest.

Molly Wood 

then this feels like the call to action part. Like how can, if people are listening and they're sustainability professionals or high net worth individuals or medium net worth individuals, like how can people help and get involved?

Paul 

Yeah. Yeah. Well, honestly, let us help you is the answer. Like we are a nonprofit. We do this work for free. we right now, you know, last year alone, we engaged with companies with over $500 billion in cash and investments. We provide free, no cost consulting services right now because we're trying to get this movement going. And so if you have a company or if you're even an individual, you just want to know more, just shoot me an email, [paulotopofinance.org](http://paulotopofinance.org/). We can bring our world-class team of data people to help you move this forward, whether you're a big company or an everyday individual. And if you know somebody who wants to put a lot of money behind this, definitely send them our way because this is something that I think really does have the potential to sort of revolutionize how we treat financial management in this country. And I think it's much more, mean, obviously, I'm saying that at a time where we're in this massive rollback period and the anti-ESG movement is sort of sweeping the country. But there's so much more in terms of the fundamentals around this that are real in terms of return and impact and also like that aren't political. It's just about like if you can make money building municipal bonds that are doing things to help cities and that are greener, like that's real. That's not political. That's just, you know, the reality is the finance. And so that's what we're trying to turn on its head.

Molly Wood

Paul Moynihanster, [topofinance.org](http://topofinance.org/). Go there immediately, change the world. Thanks so much for the time, 

Paul

Yeah, thank you.

We're talking about uninvested cash, right? This is not like your personal IRA or your invested saving, know, invested account.

Paul 

Yeah, thank you.

Molly Wood Voice-Over:

That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. Come on isn’t it a little bit reassuring to know that we totally have the money to do this we just need to like do it? 

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