Next up in our tech series, we hear from Etcho’s Charlie French on the power of tech to deliver personalised, sustainable investing at scale.
Sustainable investing has experienced a mix of fortunes over recent years. Not that long ago, sustainability and ESG were top of the national and industry agenda, with ambitious talk of net zero goals and Covid-19 prompting a rethink about both health and the environment.
Then came a kind of ‘hard landing’. Sustainability fell out of favour, and global challenges, the cost of living crisis and perhaps a general scepticism set in.
But for Charlie French, co-founder of Etcho, the important thing isn’t investment trends, but instead tapping into people’s values and then aligning their wealth accordingly.
He says: “The research is consistently strong, and actually a lot of people are interested [in sustainable investing]. The point is everybody cares about something. It just depends how much they care, and what they care about.”
A Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing survey of 2,250 investors in North America, Europe and Asia Pacific, published in April, found that 92% were interested in sustainable investing, up from 88% in 2025.
Yet unless you’re a specialist in sustainable investing, Charlie argues there can be a disconnect between what consumers want and adviser perception. He sometimes hears from advisers that the proportion of clients wanting their money to have a positive impact is one in 100. It’s this “communication gap” Etcho is looking to solve.
“Advisers have always been amazing at planning conversations and giving advice. But when it comes to sustainability, ESG and values specifically, it can be a really difficult conversation to approach. There’s a sense of opening up a massive can of worms if you go there.
“So what can happen is the conversation gets avoided. We wanted to build a tool that gave firms the confidence to have that conversation, and to enable portfolios that reflect everybody’s different set of values, and what they are trying to achieve.”
Sustainability, and beyond
Charlie has spent his career in sustainability and impact investing. Prior to Etcho he worked at UNICEF, supporting projects that advanced the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. He became frustrated with seeing people keen to have a positive impact, but who’d then find it difficult to invest with that in mind.
His brother-in-law Liall Medina, who was working in ESG data at ratings agency Standard & Poor’s, shared this frustration. They decided to set up a business to make that process easier, and in 2021 Etcho was born.
There are two strands to what Etcho does: Etcho Engage, which Charlie describes as “values-based portfolio matching”; and personalised portfolios, which offer tailored model portfolios informed by a client’s own views.
Etcho Engage is designed to provide a suitability process around clients’ values, either using existing risk profiling or its own values-based profiling process. The emphasis is on making this engaging, bringing out stories or scenarios and seeing how people react. A natural language processing element has also been built in to capture clients’ concerns and interests in their own words.
He believes Etcho can complement advisers’ and paraplanners’ existing investment research processes.
“You can do your research on a tool like Analyser, then come out with say three providers that are good options for the client. You can then load them into the Etcho tool and see how well they align on the values front. You don’t necessarily have to use us to generate a portfolio, you can do it on portfolios that already exist.
“For example, does this have exposure to the client’s express preferences, or the things they’re wanting to avoid? You can then have a really engaging conversation with the client to say: ‘This is where it sits. As you’re really wary about investing in fossil fuels, or if you want exposure to companies positively aligned to gender equality, then we should go with this portfolio.’ It helps to enrich that advice.”
The second strand of what Etcho offers is personalised portfolios – taking clients’ preferences and inputs and mapping these to an investment manager’s buy list and using this analysis to generate a portfolio.
Charlie says these aspects of the tool support advice professionals from a Consumer Duty point of view (clients have a deeper level of understanding of what they’re investing in), but also a suitability one, as clients get sustainable investing advice that’s tailored rather than off the shelf.
AI can also be used to answer specific questions about the portfolios and what they’re invested in.
“Levelling up”
“Typically, the optimal outcome that’s personalised has been reserved for the ultra-wealthy… What our tool enables is for that to be scalable, and offered to more clients.”
Feedback is that different firms are getting different things out of using Etcho. Sustainable specialists see the benefit, but Charlie says it’s also helping those who wouldn’t normally factor this into their process to “level up.”
“A lot of firms have in-house propositions, with a panel of perhaps three or four portfolios. It can be hard to know if a client has expressed an interest in sustainability which one they should then go into. This gives an auditable, defendable process around values, which can be saved onto the client’s file with a client-facing report.
“One thing larger firms really like is getting workforce harmony on this. Typically, there are one or two champions in the firm who are really into sustainability, and it all falls to them. Etcho allows the whole workforce to feel upskilled in that.”
Charlie argues the tool isn’t about catering to a sustainability “niche”, but equipping every firm to have a conversation about clients’ values. Clients then have the option to invest in line with those values. He says the alternative is a risk profiling/fact-find process that flags a preference or belief, which then just “leads to a dead end or unknown next step. This actually allows for that next step to take place.”
While sustainability is broader than the climate crisis alone, he says the current backdrop lends itself to bringing these themes back to the fore.
“The way the world is just now, there are hosepipe bans in much of the country, we’ve seen getting up to 38 degrees and for some it’s been a pretty uncomfortable summer. It’s undeniable these things are on people’s minds, unfortunately it’s the reality. As more and more clients think about this, being pro-active as a firm could open new demographics, and enrich conversations in that way.”
While traditional model portfolios have been great for efficiency, Charlie says, the tech now exists to preserve that efficiency but also personalise investments at the same time.
“Typically, that optimal outcome that’s personalised to a client has been reserved for the ultra-wealthy, because it’s been impossible to do at scale. What our tool enables is for that to be scalable, and offered to more clients. That’s ultimately what we’re trying to achieve.”
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Analyser from the lang cat has partnered with Etcho to help client conversations around sustainability go one step further. Advice professionals can continue their MPS due diligence from Analyser into Etcho or vice versa.
