Tom Coton on why the "traditional finance career" doesn't really exist anymore

So then let's fast forward to CAM, to Climate Asset Management.

So you mentioned the role was interesting because chance to really build something, which is quite a rare thing to do.

So talk me through how that played out and, you know, go where you want with it, but what those, what these last couple of years have looked like in terms of building that function and yeah, how that's kind of manifested in the day to day.

yeah so as i said there was i can't remember exactly what employer and number i was but it was relatively early on the first kind of real day-to-day operator of anything um so we launched our first fund the natural capital fund um september 2021 which was just i was joining went fairly big fairly quickly we had two principal strategies one is natural capital which is um basically investing in farms and forests more of a a traditional looking type fund structure, very real asset based, looking for financial return to institutional investors.

And then the second one is returning carbon back to industrial players who are looking to offset it for their own industrial needs.

Both of them relatively new, both of them Article 9, but the second one in particular is obviously very, very nascent.

So I think both the fun part and the challenge throughout has been There isn't a model to copy here.

There isn't a, this is a real estate fund, so you use Yardie, off you go.

And there isn't a clear competitor like us that we can just understand what the weathered and tested method is.

I've coached been around for a little bit longer, but even in this guise, it's been a bit different.

And when we were first fundraising, we would have to go out there and convince people of this thing, this allocation called natural capital.

It's investable.

It should be seen as mainstream.

It's not an impact category.

Whereas now people will come to the room and tell us about the thing called natural capital, which is quite nice to see, but also shows how quickly the world can move and evolve.

something like this which i completely believe should be a main um allocation class how quickly it can take off

um

which i guess in my somewhat short career compared to the industry i haven't really seen that before i've seen the um the boom of infrastructure particularly renewables back when i was at langham hall and but i actually see it start from this early on has been yeah really exciting So yes, we went out to market really quickly with both strategies.

We had three funds.

So one for one principal fund for each and a hybrid up and running by the middle of 22.

So kind of within nine months.

And then it's been about building out in a kind of organic as we see as necessary way from there.

So for my exposure in particular, building out the different core functions, tax specialists, legal, COSEC, et cetera, on the fund side.

And then we were doing a lot of our corporate services from our shareholders when we started, but slowly bringing those in-house as well, ultimately into now.

a finance director role that looks after both the corporate finance and fund finance teams separately.