sustainable-investing
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The 100-Year-Old Money Machine Betting Its Next C$70 Million on AI - Without Firing the Humans
IGM Financial spent a century turning face-to-face advice into a Canadian institution. Now it is cutting complexity, absorbing a C$95.3 million charge and recycling the savings into AI - a test of whether old trust and new software can compound together.
UBS
How a 163-year-old Swiss bank became the world's largest wealth manager - by absorbing the rival that nearly took the whole system down with it.
Fennel
Fennel is a New York-based mobile investing app that lets everyday retail investors trade commission-free stocks and ETFs while surfacing digestible ESG data and shareholder-voting information for the companies they own. Founded in 2022 by former physics PhD and dark-matter researcher Daniel Naim, Fennel positions itself as a B Corp-certified brokerage that refuses payment for order flow and does not lend out customer shares - so votes stay with the shares. For a $4.99 monthly subscription, users get 25+ financial metrics, 200+ ESG indicators, AI-powered news sentiment, and tools to follow past and upcoming shareholder ballots.
Daniel Naim
Daniel Naim is the founder and CEO of Fennel, a mobile investing app that hands everyday retail investors the ESG data and shareholder-voting power that big institutions usually keep to themselves. A former dark-matter physicist who grew up in Beirut and earned a physics PhD at UC Davis, Naim left the lab in 2020 - watching California burn and Engine No. 1 win an Exxon board fight - convinced that capital markets, not particle detectors, were the most pressing problem he could work on. Fennel refuses payment for order flow, won't lend out users' shares, became a certified B Corp, and was named one of Fast Company's most innovative companies in personal finance.