Why did I feel it was interesting to interview Louis? Because he is the co-founder of a company at the forefront of AI-driven sustainable finance. With a background in private banking at Crédit Agricole’s Indosuez Wealth Management, Louis has developed a deep understanding of the complexities of financial operations and the barriers to aligning capital with sustainability. His work at Naera is focused on reducing operational friction for investment professionals, enabling them to make data-driven decisions that drive both financial returns and measurable impact in SDG-linked investments.

In this interview, he shares his insights on the evolving role of finance in shaping a sustainable future, the challenges of scaling AI-driven solutions, and the importance of governance in ethical decision-making. He discusses the trade-offs between short-term profits and long-term impact, the necessity of collaboration between financial institutions, governments, and NGOs, and the role of uncertainty in driving innovation. His perspective—both pragmatic and optimistic—sheds light on how finance, technology, and sustainability can converge to create a more resilient and inclusive global economy.

Here’s our exchange:

Where are you from originally, and how was your childhood there?

I grew up in Chexbres, a small village between Lausanne and Montreux in the center of Lavaux, above Vevey. The region is well known for its panoramic view of the lake and mountains, especially during a walk through the vineyards. As you can imagine, in such a landscape, I spent a lot of time outside playing and imagining, but I was also addicted to building LEGO Technic and exploring the mysteries of Ancient Egypt.

How was your family composed, and what were the family dynamics like?

I grew up with my mom, dad, and siblings in an old winemaker’s house. We always did a lot of things together as a family—dinners at night, lunches with my siblings, and spending weekends and holidays together.

Who were the most influential people in your childhood, and what lessons did you learn from them?

Honestly, this is a question I always ask myself when I hear someone talking about their role models and heroes. I find it difficult to shine a light on one specific person or lesson. From what I can remember, my childhood was shaped similarly to how my life is shaped now—through encounters and exposure to various people, objects, and environments, each either strengthening, expanding, or questioning my mental model of the world.

Accordingly, my parents were the most influential. They provided me with an environment, support, and education that allowed me to grow—whether consciously or unconsciously. I believe that most of the values, manners, and curiosity I hold today were inherited and learned from them.

How does Naera use AI to decrease transaction costs in nature-positive and SDG-linked investments, and what sets your approach apart from other financial technology solutions?

Investments that deliver value beyond financial returns—such as those with impact-generating products or services—require additional review and contextualization to ensure the reliability of the forecasted impact and the pathway to profitability. Getting real-time access to the expertise needed to evaluate every aspect of an investment and gathering all the necessary information to support investment decisions is time-consuming and expensive, leading to the following bottlenecks:

1. Small investors with funds of less than 100 million cannot effectively spread the additional costs linked to this review and contextualization across their operations, leading to higher fees and lower effective returns.
2. Traditional investors might fear the prospect of higher costs, lower returns, and a loss of clients, preventing them from shifting their activities toward seeking more than just financial performance.
3. Large investors (funds exceeding 100 million) who can effectively distribute these additional costs are more likely to discredit small investment opportunities due to high overhead costs, preferring to allocate resources toward larger targets with a smaller ratio of evaluation cost to investment size.

Naera’s software consists of a set of AI agents that hold generalized knowledge about various domain expert topics. This enables investors to quickly assess whether an investment opportunity aligns with their objectives and requirements, providing a snapshot of its financial and impact performance within minutes.

With the heavy lifting handled by AI, specialist analysts can focus on reviewing flagged aspects and investigating critical details. This drastically reduces the time to filter potential deals, allowing for a more efficient selection of investments ready for decision-makers. As a result, transactions can be processed at a fraction of their current cost.

By limiting the green premium, we lower the cost barrier, increasing the attractiveness of impact-generating investments. At the same time, reducing the knowledge barriers required to enter the field enhances accessibility, making it easier for more investors to participate in impact-driven investments.

The triple planetary crisis encompasses climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. How does Naera prioritize among these issues in its investment strategies?

I grew up in nature, spending my childhood in the mountains and lakes, stunned by the beauty of sunsets. However, it was not until recently that I fully realized how nature is the foundation of everything, including us.

When thinking about priorities, I encourage everyone to take a step back from the traditional metrics used to measure progress in tackling these crises, such as CO₂ reduction, and instead ask themselves: What kind of world do I want my future self and children to live in? Imagine these two scenarios:

1. A Blade Runner 2049-like desert, eating lab-grown worms and admiring a constantly dusty sky.
2. A world in harmony with forests, fields, and animals, eating fresh, cultivated food, and being amazed by the diversity of skies.

Try prompting these descriptions in an AI like DALL·E to visualize what I mean. Even if technological advancements such as carbon capture plants, lab-grown meat, and air filtration masks can address specific problems, their effectiveness is often measured against a single metric. But does this lead to a future we actually want to experience?

A narrow focus on individual issues results in technologies optimized for single outcomes, often generating unintended consequences elsewhere. Conversely, nature is the fundamental layer of our universe and operates as a complex system. Prioritizing nature first provides a holistic solution that simultaneously addresses climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution.

I understand that turning this vision into reality in the current economic and political environment is challenging. The right level of technology, applied in the right place, can add enormous value. As a company, we offer software that helps financial intermediaries operate more efficiently, ensuring that more of the capital they raise can be deployed on the ground—where it truly makes a difference.

So rather than prioritizing a specific crisis, we focus on increasing the impact-to-cost ratio across all the challenges we face.

How do you address skepticism from investors who may view nature-positive and SDG-linked investments as less profitable or riskier than traditional options?

It’s a question of framing, in my opinion. Too often, people make misaligned comparisons—such as evaluating an early-stage technology straight out of the lab against an industry counterpart that has benefited from 50 years of production and distribution optimization. Or they assess the potential of a sustainable forestry project using software growth metrics and conclude that it’s too risky or less profitable.

Climate, nature, and SDGs are not standalone industries. They represent evolutions in technology and business models within existing industries. Proper framing means comparing apples to apples—for instance, evaluating sustainable timber production using continuous cover forestry versus traditional commercial timber.

Even then, the sustainable option might initially seem less profitable. Let’s take a practical example:

• Investment A (a commercial forest) produces 100 units of timber at an operating cost of CHF 40.
• Investment B (a sustainable forest) produces the same 100 units of timber but also sequesters 40 units of carbon and purifies 30 units of air and water, at a cost of CHF 60.

If timber is the only marketable product, selling at CHF 80 per unit, Investment B appears less competitive, despite offering additional benefits. Private investors, bound by fiduciary duty, struggle to justify choosing the costlier option when these extra benefits have no direct market value.

However, what has no value for private investors may have tremendous value for public entities. Investment B’s ability to reduce pollution, cool urban areas, and lower health risks makes it attractive to city councils. These benefits can increase local settlement, boost economic activity, and enhance tax revenue. If a public entity covers the cost of air and water purification, Investment B’s effective production cost drops from CHF 60 to CHF 30, making it even more attractive than Investment A for private investors.

The key is reframing: understanding who can convert what into monetary value. What may seem unprofitable in one context becomes highly attractive in another.

AI systems can inherit biases from the data they are trained on. How do you ensure that Naera’s AI tools remain unbiased and equitable in supporting sustainable investments?

Since we do not train the foundational AI models ourselves, we do not control the raw data they are built on. However, many of the companies developing these models are doing great work to address bias-related challenges.

On our side, we continuously test different models to select those that best fit our objectives. We extend their knowledge with specialized datasets, apply additional instructions, and implement tools and guardrails where necessary.

That said, it’s crucial to remember that our tool is not meant to replace human decision-making. Rather, it significantly reduces the effort required to gather the necessary information for informed decision-making—bringing users from 0% to 80% understanding, while leaving the final 20% for human investigation. As we say in French, en connaissance de cause—making decisions with full awareness.

What challenges have you faced in integrating technologies like distributed systems and smart contracts into Naera’s operations, and how have you overcome them?

Currently, we haven’t implemented smart contracts or distributed systems into our operations, even though my co-founder and I have been experimenting with these technologies for several years. The reason is simple: at this stage, it would create more roadblocks than opportunities.

For example, blockchain technology won’t solve trust issues if the underlying data stored on-chain is unreliable. However, we are prepared to make the leap when and if the time is right.

On another note, considering the copyright concerns raised in the era of Large Language Models (LLMs), I believe blockchain could offer a unique opportunity to better reward those who contribute knowledge to these models. If we could attach authorship to the information that LLMs use to generate responses, we could envision fractional rewards being distributed to the original creators through smart contracts. Who knows? That might be a topic for another time.

With your background in private banking and wealth management, how has your perspective on traditional finance shaped Naera’s innovative approach to sustainable finance?

It helps me see that the financial sector is not inherently good or bad. It’s the business of placing capital into what will most likely generate value in the future. This makes me optimistic about the steering role the sector can play in accelerating the transition to the current and future environmental, social, and economic reality.

However, my experience also showed me that finance is a business like any other. It has shareholders and customers with objectives to satisfy and sales goals to reach. Take, for example, a loan officer at a bank—someone shared this with me not long ago. The traditional loan processing and underlying risk are well known. When it comes to a green loan, it requires the loan officer to spend more time analyzing its viability to minimize not only financial risk but also greenwashing risk. Suppose this person’s performance is benchmarked against their peers based on the volume of loans processed during a quarter. Like anyone else, this person has to satisfy their organization’s needs if they want to keep their job. In that case, there are little incentives to spend the extra time looking at the sustainable option.

Therefore, it is crucial that sustainable finance doesn’t come with a green premium for the financial sector, its contributors, and asset owners. The transition will be difficult if everything sustainable comes at an extra cost.

Lastly, to answer your point on innovation—from the first weeks at my job, I have always been interested in automating the robotic part of my job using technology to have more space to think about the complex parts of it, starting with simple Excel formulas like VLOOKUP. This narrative hasn’t changed and is undoubtedly one of the fundamental forces behind Naera: empowering people with a tool that gives them more time and access to information to tackle the intriguing aspects of their jobs.

How do you envision Naera scaling its impact to address global sustainability challenges, particularly in underfunded regions or sectors?

For the sustainable transition to succeed globally, we must ensure that sustainable alternatives are accessible based on the economic realities of a family in Cairo, not just a family in Germany. This applies particularly to key trade-offs, like choosing between electric and fuel vehicles or between renewable energy and petrol.

Referring back to our north star of increasing the impact-to-cost ratio, improving the attractiveness and accessibility of investment in underfunded regions or sectors is the prime objective. Often, such areas have problems related to political and currency instability that make an investment too risky, even if the investment fundamentals are robust. In these scenarios, the relevance of bringing a mix of capital providers together to spread the risks, costs, and rightfully value all the benefits one investment brings is more crucial than ever.

The downfall of these additional collaborations is the extra cost of moving the money from one hand to another. Our solution can support neutralizing this additional cost. However, at the core, it requires not technology but collaboration between entities and countries that do not speak the same language—both figuratively and literally.

Given your focus on governance, how do you ensure that Naera maintains ethical and effective decision-making processes as it grows?

The question of ethics without context is a complex topic. Take an example that comes to mind: Is it more ethical to fire a highly paid financial analyst in New York to replace them with AI if it enables a firm to make one more investment that creates 100 jobs in Sudan and lifts 500 families out of famine yearly? My intuition tells me yes.

My point is that ethics, much like impact and economics, are not a hard science. The same situations can have different “correct” results based on their context, making it so complex—if not impossible—to standardize. Our objective is to build financial infrastructure that serves our stakeholders and moves toward our north star. We are not the sole decision-makers on what is ethical or not.

What role do you see for collaboration with governments and NGOs in driving the adoption of nature-positive investments?

As you may have realized from my previous answer—MASSIVE. Let’s do it! It is the lowest-hanging fruit at our disposal right now that can have a real catalyst effect to bring these investments to competitive and stable risk-adjusted returns.

There are so many interesting blended finance vehicles that can be leveraged. I particularly fancy Debt-for-Nature Swaps, which can be repurposed into Debt-for-SDGs Swaps, supporting underfunded countries whose debt burden and inflation prevent economic growth. The basic principle enables borrowing countries to repay a smaller proportion of their initial loan as long as they use the money saved to finance national activities that drive economic growth while generating positive social and environmental impact, such as building a school or protecting a mangrove forest.

How does Naera handle conflicts between short-term financial returns and long-term sustainability goals in its investment strategy?

As we can see from the state of our planet and economies, everything comes with a cost. Asset bubbles arrive with a debt burden, while outrageous profit comes with environmental destruction and human exploitation.

The problem is that the cost is often delayed and paid by a different party than the one gaining the profit, which explains why it’s not accounted for—and makes short-term profit possible in the first place.

Investment relies on the world moving forward and is a long-term game. To some extent, it is equally about predicting and creating the future through a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you ask around:

• Do you want cleaner air or more pollution?
• Drinkable water or infected water?
• Healthy food or disease-carrying food?

I reckon few people would seek the latter options. Individual contributors to society will sooner or later favor enterprises that offer them products and services that help build the future they want to live in. Therefore, companies delivering these products and services will trade at a premium in the long run.

Our tool is designed to support investors who focus on value creation for the next decades.

In your experience, how do leadership styles affect performance and innovation within a company like Naera?

That’s a good moment to state the following: Naera is an early-stage company with a tiny team, so I believe I have a lot of trial and error to go through as a leader moving forward.

Every organization, its human building blocks, and its environment are different. What works for some may not work for others. I look forward to seeing what works for us.

I can say that each participant in our company is an expert in their field and is the leader of their respective topics.

What are the biggest challenges and opportunities for scaling AI-driven solutions in sustainable finance?

Challenges and opportunities go hand-in-hand. Here are three of the most crucial ones:

1. Reducing AI energy consumption – This creates massive opportunities along the value chain, from energy sources and hardware manufacturing to model architecture research.
2. Accessibility and privacy – AI systems need access to the right data and the capacity for users to interact with them effectively while maintaining privacy.
3. Purpose of AI – AI should remain a tool that helps humans focus on creativity, debate, and collaboration—not a substitute for human experience.

What role does uncertainty play in shaping your approach to life and decisions?

I see uncertainty as the unexplored areas of a map. Uncovering new areas comes with discoveries and worries, but it gives me control over what I previously didn’t understand.

If everything were known, life would be predictable and dull—like an algorithm.

What do you think humanity owes to one another, if anything?

Humility. We owe our knowledge and lives to the trial and error of our ancestors. They made the best decisions they could with the information they had. We are not inherently smarter or more ethical—just better informed.

You are in the last minutes of your life. What news related to your professional career would you like to hear?

That the little amount of knowledge my experience generated has been valuable to the next generation to make better decisions than I did.