Spotlight on the winners of the Innovation Trophies 2022

Five months after the first edition of the Innovation Trophies, La Banque Postale Asset Management (LBP AM) and Tocqueville Finance brought together winners and partners for the "Innovation Club". The event was held on 21 March at Platform 58, the incubator of La Banque Postale - a sustainable commitment to start-ups.

Wishing to give a factual overview, Michel Saugné, Director of Management at Tocqueville Finance, said, by way of introduction: "France has a GDP of €3,000 billion. SMEs account for 50% of employees and 10% of GDP, i.e. €300 billion in our economy. The CAC Small index has a market capitalization of €16 billion and the universe of the Equity Savings Plan -SME funds only €5 billion... There is still work to be done to promote our gems and our territories!”

A key player in the financing of small and medium-sized French companies and a pioneer in responsible investment in Europe, LBP AM and Tocqueville Finance have since 2020 been supporting the future "unicorns" of the French Tech sector: they have participated in the "Scale-UP" initiative supported by the French Ministry of the Economy and Finance and Mr Philippe Tibi, which is geared to financing the French champions of today and tomorrow through a long-term commitment to the Paris financial market. Tocqueville Technologie ISR and Tocqueville Global Tech ISR are part of this commitment.

We have been financing cutting-edge medical research in France since 2021. The health crisis has highlighted the dire need for funding to support our healthcare professionals. Following the success of an invitation to tender, the LBP AM group has committed to long-term support for research in all areas of health, with particular focus on small companies and biotech. This initiative was completed during the same financial year by the launch of two "Relaunch" funds to support French SMEs in listed and real assets.
 

The Trophies and the winning fintechs

Another part of French Tech will be promoted in 2022: Fintechs. Alongside Investance Partners, Finance Innovation and BSmart, LBP AM and Tocqueville Finance have organized the first edition of the Innovation Trophies, which reward innovative fintechs with sustainable business models.

On 21 March, the 4 winning fintechs in 2022 presented their projects at La Banque Postale's Platform 58 :

• Carbometrix : This platform is dedicated to financial institutions for assessing the carbon footprint of companies. "Our calculation solution is reliable, fast and non-intrusive, for it does not require any connection to the information system of the company being assessed. Our support includes risk measurement, decarbonization and the integration of reports that meet the criteria of regulators. Finally, our approach is faithful to the 'Bilan Carbone' methodology, which takes into account the physical flow of emissions, and meets Scope 3 of the regulation," said Corinne Bach, Co-founder and CEO of Carbometrix.

• Fruggr : This digital ESG monitoring platform is geared to assessing the impact of applications and to changing the digital footprint. Valérie Reynaud, Manager of Responsible Digital Consulting, and Vincent Ducas, Manager of Consulting at Fruggr, said: "Although it creates value, the dematerialization of economic activities also generates a transfer of pollution and has an impact on vulnerable groups (digital illiteracy, white zones, etc.). Our tool measures the impact of any digital medium against some fifty ESG criteria. We work across the entire responsible digital value chain, from strategic consulting to web and mobile development (eco-design).

• Handsome : This first payment card is accessible to all visually impaired people. The cardholder inserts it into the payment terminal and the smartphone speaks the protocol written on the terminal. A visually impaired person can thus hear what we can read during the payment. "9 out of 10 visually impaired people have already come across fraud or error when paying at a retailer! We designed this connected card in cooperation with disabled people. It spells real progress by giving them back their independence of action", said Julien Delamorte, CEO of Handsome.

• Weather Trade Net : At the edge between the DeepTech, ClimateTech, FinTech and InsurTech space, the service provides data translated into physical climate risk scores. Elena Maksimovich, CEO of Weather Trade Net said: "The instantaneous calculations of our tool make it possible to devise several scenarios for the climate risk, from a few days to several decades. Based on data from some sixty sources (national meteorological services, satellite data, etc.), our service provides physical and transition risk modelling. This is a valuable decision-making aid in the financial and insurance sectors, as well as in the maritime, textile and semi-conductor industries.

  The event was brought to a close by Patrick Pansier, Head of Data, Digital and Innovation, who presented LBP AM's "Digital Lab" which is in charge of flagship projects around innovation. More specifically, he presented the creation of an SRI Data Hub, a platform that integrates financial and extra-financial data. "Our objective is to integrate a multitude of data from various suppliers, which are not always consistent or structured, hence their complexity. Our processing work consisted in identifying and then matching the ESG indicators provided by the twenty or so suppliers to our population of issuers, as the codes used were far from homogeneous," explains Patrick Pansier, Head of Data, Digital and Innovation.

  This session paved the way for new collaborative exchanges with certain entities of the La Poste group and La Banque Postale!

  Next event: the call for applications in June for the 2nd edition of Innovation Trophies. "We intend to confirm the initiative with the 2nd edition in 2023 when the field will be extended to Greentechs", Michel Saugné announced. Stay tuned !