What if you could help build a sustainable future without millions of dollars or a background in finance? Inyova was created with this in mind—allowing ordinary people to support a more sustainable world through investing.
We sat down with CEO and founder Dr. Tillmann Lang to better understand how Inyova is helping people and organizations promote environmental responsibility, clean energy, and human rights.
What role does investing serve in creating a more sustainable world?
Investments play a crucial role in shaping our society's future. According to top environmental NGOs like the WWF, finance is one of the most significant and unused levers in the fight against climate change. This lever can be used directly by human investing in sustainable businesses or projects.
Every investment has an impact. Even the money in your savings account. It ends up financing something, usually in very indirect ways. So there isn't any transparency around what your money is supporting. It could be used to help develop a new kind of sustainable technology, or perhaps the money will help a company explore fossil fuels in Antarctica.
Investing with a platform like Inyova gives people the autonomy to decide what causes they want to invest in, helping them shape the future of our planet. For instance, by supporting the development of green technology through investing. We would not have cheap solar energy today if we had not invested a significant amount of capital in this 20 years ago.
For this reason, it is essential that we pay attention to what we invest in today to ensure that we create the kind of society we want to live in tomorrow.
How do you choose which companies users can invest in on the Inyova platform?
Our decision to feature a company is based on data-driven conclusions about their future environmental impact. We ask questions like, do they have a climate-compliant business model that aligns with the terms outlined in the Paris Agreement, or are they positively impacting society?
We draw our conclusions from large volumes of data collected from a variety of different sources. We take account of data distributed by the company, third-party analytics, and public information. We then feed this into our data algorithms and run an analysis to determine the impact this company will have on the world/environment.
The companies on our platform are all publicly traded ones and include some of the largest organizations in the world like Tesla, as well as new players in the sustainability game like Beyond Meat and Oatly.
The climate crisis is a people problem. When we speak about the sustainability issue, we are not talking about saving the planet, but about saving the human race.
Where do you see Inyova 5 years from now?
Our goal is to become the primary investment platform for everyday people. We know that most people in Europe don't invest enough. Many people feel like investing is not for them, believing it to be too complex.
Inyova is the perfect platform for these individuals. We make investing accessible. It’s fully transparent because you can see exactly which companies you invest in. And it’s personalized to your values and financial situation.
You’re investing to make your money grow while also making the world better. Our impact portfolios thereby build a relationship between the investor and their investment.
What role will companies play in the push for sustainability?
There are many important actors in the push for sustainability—consumers and companies are just two of them. Consumers take actions every day that impact the environment, whether that is choosing to eat meat or reducing their food waste.
Companies are highly significant for the push for sustainability. Everything that happens during their production process can have an enormous environmental impact. It's up to them to make better decisions about where to source their materials or whether to put toxic pollutants into the environment during the manufacturing process.
Even if consumers choose to buy products or services created unsustainably, the core of solving the sustainability problem lies with companies. Without turning around companies, we won’t turn around the environment.
What makes you optimistic about our ability as a society to create a greener world?
I believe in people. The climate crisis is a people problem. When we speak about the sustainability issue, we are not talking about saving the planet, but about saving the human race. The world will not cease to exist if we don't become more sustainable, but humans might.
Whenever there has been a crisis, humans have proven extremely resourceful, often coming up with new ideas and solutions. I think we are already beginning to see the same happening in our climate crisis.
There are also strong indications that the world is developing a greener vision of the future. Every political party and company is much greener than they were 10 years ago. CEOs are being forced to consider sustainability when making decisions for the longevity of their career.
This is what gives me a lot of hope about society's ability to create a better and more sustainable future.