Date

October 03 2023

TIME

08:45 - 14:00 BST

Roundtable discussion

Tackling our climate crisis through innovation and collaboration

A must attend event for FinTechs, financial services and climate stakeholders across a range of other sectors.

Event Summary

Research, innovation and collaboration continue to underpin Scotland’s commitment to respond effectively to the challenges of climate change and in supporting efforts to achieve a net zero economy by 2045.

Finance, technology and data collectively have a role to play in creating the infrastructure required to deliver a sustainable future, and in enabling businesses and people from different industries and disciplines to work together to facilitate change.

Join us for this half day conference as we consider action and approaches to tackling climate change through collaboration across a range of sectors including fintech, financial services, housing, energy and space.

Agenda

8:45 AM – 9:30 AM

Arrival, Registration, Breakfast & Networking

9:30 AM – 9:35 AM

Welcome from Event Chair, Paul Forrest, MBN Soultions

9:35 AM – 9:45 AM

Opening Address

Speaker

9:45 AM – 10:25 AM

Panel Discussion: Addressing our climate crisis with technology and data

speaker

10:25 AM – 10:45 AM

Delivering climate action through cross sector collaboration: Housing & Energy

Speaker

10:45 AM – 11:15 AM

Break & Networking

11:15 AM – 11:35 AM

Delivering climate action through cross sector collaboration: Space

11:35 AM – 11:55 AM

Playing an active role in driving positive climate action

11:55 AM – 12:35 PM

Fireside Chat: Financed Emissions and a just transition for SMEs

12:30 PM – 12:35 PM

Closing Remarks from the Chair, Paul Forrest

12:35 PM – 1:30 PM

Lunch & Networking

1:30 PM – 1:45 PM

Close

Key sessions and themes will include:

-Tackling the climate crisis with technology and data.

-Delivering climate action through cross sector collaboration: Housing, energy and space

-Can the financial services industry effectively bring climate science into its decision making:

-Financed emissions and a just transition for SMEs

Speakers

Nicola Anderson, CEO, FinTech Scotland

Nicola is the CEO of FinTech Scotland. FinTech Scotland works across private, public and third sectors, and academia to enable economic growth and inclusion in the developing face of digital financial services. Nicola is a business leader with experience across multiple sectors and supporting innovation, people development, building strategy, change management, understanding risk and financial services regulation. She has considerable experience in financial services and prior to joining FinTech Scotland was a senior leader at the FCA, where she worked as part of the Retail Banking Supervision senior leadership team. As the CEO of FinTech Scotland, she contributed to the development of solutions needed to address complex industry issues following the financial crisis. She has engaged with Boards and Executives at different retail banks on a number of significant business transformational changes and operational risk issues, often working in collaboration with other UK regulatory bodies.

Fraser Tough, Head of Climate Data Science & Innovation, Natwest

Fraser Tough is the Head of Climate Data Science and Innovation at NatWest, leading strategic development of climate modelling within the bank. Fraser focuses on addressing emerging climate challenges by developing solutions to quantify and mitigate climate risk for corporate and retail customers.
He joined NatWest after moving from the renewable energy sector where he utilised data science to enable data-based decision-making across renewables markets and technologies. Fraser is a professional statistician holding a BSc, MSc, and Ph.D. in statistics and is an honorary research fellow at the University of Glasgow’s School of Mathematics and Statistics.

Kirsteen Harrison, Environment & Sustainability Advisor, Zumo

Kirsteen is an established specialist in the development of net zero strategies. With an overarching interest in the role of organisational culture in enabling effective climate action, Kirsteen works with leaders to facilitate the mindset shift required for businesses to thrive in a net zero future. Kirsteen has developed a particular interest in blockchains and cryptocurrencies, both as part of the problem, and as part of the solution, and is Environmental Adviser to the Board at Zumo, and a freelance consultant. Having gained a Distinction in her Masters degree in Environmental Technology from Imperial College some 20 years ago, Kirsteen has since worked with organisations of all types and sizes, and works collaboratively to tackle sector-wide issues. She is a stubborn optimist with a fierce conviction that businesses should be a force for good.

Alisdair Gunn, Director, Glasgow City Innovation District

Alisdair is recognised by his peers as one of Scotland’s prominent professional advisers amongst Scotland’s digital and technology sector. Alisdair leads the development of Glasgow City Innovation District – Scotland’s first Innovation District and is the founder of Framewire, Scotland’s first advisory practice dedicated to developing Scotland’s Digital and Tech Ecosystem.

Alisdair is the co-founder of the internationally acclaimed Turing Festival and at the inaugural Scottish Tech Startup Awards was awarded the first Tech Ecosystem award where his peers recognised his expertise and commitment to developing Scotland’s Tech Ecosystem.

Alisdair is an Independent Board Adviser to Barclays Eagle Labs and is a board advisor to Amiqus and VeryConnect and a member of Johnston Carmichael’s Tech Advisory Board.

Robin Sampson, Founder & Managing Director, Trade in Space

Robin has over a decade of professional experience in developing New Space technology, missions, and advanced space concept. He is a prominent member of the global small-sat community since it’s beginnings. Robin has worked close-up with disruptive technologies throughout his career.
Robin founded Trade in Space, to develop new ways to support ‘direct trade’ between food producers, and food consumers, by tokenising soft commodities using observations from space. In 2020 Trade in Space were the first team in history to create satellite-tokenized agriculture goods to be traded and delivered to a buyer anywhere in the world. Trade in Space utilised a prototype software stack to task a satellite image of a coffee production region in Colombia. Their coffee-detection machine learning algorithms quantified the coffee in view and assigned predicted yield to a registered farmer, ready to sell. Tracking delivery from Cartagena to Glasgow.
In 2021 Trade in Space launched its flagship product, Sustainimaps which measures on- farm sustainability metrics and provides reporting tools to help organisations meet their sustainability goals. This service has been instrumental in helping coffee and cacao importers prepare for EU and UK deforestation regulations.

Jules Salmond, CEO, Ciendos

Jules is CEO and co-founder of CienDos – a climate-tech business, focussed on tracking, analysing and sharing corporate emissions data. Alongside the day-to-day management and strategic direction of the business, Jules has a core focus on shaping the go to market proposition and engaging with corporate consumers of the CienDos dataset to understand their environmental and wider sustainability data needs. Prior to founding CienDos in 2021, Jules co-founded Cerico, a world-leading SaaS Third-Party Risk Management (TPRM) business. Cerico was acquired by NewsCorp’s Dow Jones in 2018 where she led TPRM globally, overseeing 10x revenue growth and complex engagements with many of the world’s largest brands. She is a seasoned keynote speaker and published thought-leader on Climate-Tech & TPRM.

Supporters:

Supporter – FinTech Scotland

FinTech Scotland’s purpose is to make a better world for all through financial innovation, collaboration and inclusion. We exist to create an integrated FinTech ecosystem through strategic coordination, the provision of funding, support, infrastructure and talent, and respond to the needs of all stakeholders within the Scottish Fintech cluster. We believe that making Scotland a fintech capital will lead to business creation and growth, a stronger economy and more jobs. In addition, our aim is to strengthen the societal benefits from fintech developments, believing in the opportunity for retail consumers to benefit. The organisation recently published the FinTech Scotland Research & Innovation Roadmap 2022-33 which will provide strategic direction for the development and growth of the Fintech sector in Scotland for the next 10 years, with the aim of driving a threefold increase in economic growth and job creation.

Knowledge Partner – Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow

The Adam Smith Business School’s mission is to sustain and foster a place of outstanding quality, research-led and professionally-focused, bringing together inspiring people for the purposes of research, learning and teaching, and engaging with corporate and policy connections, with impact locally and globally.

Fast-moving trends in technology and banking have altered the landscape for those seeking to make an impact in the world of finance. The Adam Smith Business School provides an advanced education in the multiple converging skills and knowledge bases that are required by the organisations of the future. In addition to our cutting-edge teaching, our research and knowledge exchange work seeks to contribute to dialogue and development in the space. Our research in Fintech is delivered via our research theme ‘Digital Society’ and our Climate Finance work through our ‘Sustainability’ theme.

Data Partner – Ciendos

CienDos is a climate-tech business, focussed on tracking, analysing and sharing corporate emissions data. They provide complete emissions data and insights for companies of all sizes – covering large corporates, SMEs and micro businesses.

The Carbon Data Xchange (CDx) proprietary dataset has been developed from the ground-up, with transparency and auditability at its core, designed to support the evolving regulatory reporting, internal risk frameworks, supply-chain due diligence and customer emissions impact assessments. Blending primary company data with a wide-range of

verified external data sources, CIenDos delivers accurate & comparable company-level emissions data and insights.

Media Partner – The Scotsman

The Scotsman – Scotland’s national newspaper – has been telling your stories since 1817.

We’ve been with readers through the events which have shaped modern Scotland: the Highland Clearances, the industrial revolution, two world wars, devolution, the independence referendum and everything in between.

The Scotsman and scotsman.com delivers incisive, thought-provoking and stimulating content to reflect the vibrancy of Scotland today, and offers a range of insightful opinions, new perspectives and lively debates about everything that matters to Scotland