3 min read
Welcome! My name is Mike Chu, Founder and CEO of Recap Investing. I’m very pleased to announce the Open Beta release of Recap’s Digital Advisor Product, an investing solution that’s designed to make sustainable investing easy for new investors and seasoned investors alike. I’d also like to take the opportunity to share the story of my Recap journey so far with you.
Mike’s Story
October 2018. We were 3 days into the Canadian backcountry of Banff National Park in Alberta, and it’s been a brutal journey so far with the early season snowfall, brisk winds, and hazardous conditions. After a 5-hour early morning ascent of Devon Mountain, we’d arrived at our destination. The world seemed to stand still as we took a moment to pause, mountains as far as the eye can see, nothing of civilization except what we brought with us, just taking in the splendor of nature.
It’s hard in a moment like that not to be amazed and overwhelmed. But my mind very quickly jumped to another thought. Just a week before, you see, we were traversing the receding edges of the Athabasca Glacier at the Columbia Icefields, which is the origin of many glaciers in North America. So at that moment, the connection became real, a big issue like climate change became more than intellectual, it directly affects a place and environment that was important to me.
On our return trip, our guide told us about the IPCC special report that had just been released while we were away. While that report marked a change in a broader awareness of global warming for many in the investment community, I was disturbed by the narrative by some that “we’ve quantified the risk of climate change to global warming and it’s not so bad”. I began managing my portfolio with an ESG-focus a few years earlier but hearing statements like that made me want to do more. The mass-marketed ESG ETFs products were not enough, I wanted something more.
Recap’s Mission
That was the beginning of the journey for me. I started sharing my experiences and found two amazing co-founders, Aric and Carolyn, former classmates of mine with different financial services industry experience. Together, we saw the advancements in data and methods to measure impact in addition to ESG materiality and the opportunity to build a more impactful investing experience that anyone can access.
And already along the way, I’ve heard many more stories from others who share this vision on how the issues, and corporate behavior towards these issues, positively and negatively impact them. We’ve also found pleasant surprises – companies that are going beyond their peers to improve on a social impact area such as Bright Horizons, an innovator in early childhood education, Owens Corning who is innovating on enabling technologies for sustainable infrastructure, and CVS’ MinuteClinics which provide essential healthcare services to many vulnerable communities.
Our role is to identify innovative companies and business models that are reconfiguring themselves to a more sustainable economy and, more importantly, help investors transition towards this new reality while achieving their own financial goals. All during a time of significant transition and growing uncertainty.
What to expect in Early Access
Understand the difference your portfolio is having with Impact Dollars, Recap’s proprietary metric for measuring impact. 
Impact Dollars allow for measurable improvement of Recap portfolios over the benchmark. 
Take it one step further with Impact Stories, curated analysis to help you connect the dots with the specific activities that contribute to the impact area.
As an Early Access Recap customer, you’ll get a personalized portfolio of stocks and ETFs designed around the impact areas you choose and built to track the market efficiently. You’ll also get the things you’ve come to expect from a digital advisor product – portfolio monitoring, automatic rebalancing, and dividend reinvestment, tax-loss harvesting, and fiduciary duty as an independent advisor.
Additionally, you’ll get a special pricing plan available only for early access customers. As we continue to work on ideas to make this experience even more awesome, we’ll be looking to you for feedback – so the things you want to learn and see about sustainable investing and impactful companies, we’ll be listening and using our tech to make these things possible.
While we’re calling this “Early Access”, it is a fully-fledged investment product for those onboarded. We are a registered RIA with the SEC and we have a partnership with Interactive Brokers, a member of SIPC, who is the broker and custodian of our customers’ assets.
As a team, we also felt that it was important to get the knowledge out there on the companies we’re selecting and why. We’ve taken efforts to share what we’ve learned with you in a transparent way through our Impact Areas, Impact Dollars and Impact Stories. So we’ll be releasing a free portfolio construction tool so anyone can use it to learn about sustainable investing, UN SDGs, and how to find good impactful companies with good financial prospects.
Invitation
Our team has been dreaming, thinking, and working tirelessly on this product so this milestone feels like the end of a chapter. But really, it’s the beginning of a new one where we can share our vision with all of you. We’ve built the best investing product possible with the techniques currently available to us as a community. And we commit ourselves to continue pushing the boundaries and raising the bar to use finance as a force for good.
I invite you to join us as we continue this journey together.
Free Portfolio Tool: https://app.recapinvesting.com
Press Release: https://recapinvesting.com/2020/10/08/recap-investing-launches-a-sustainable-investing-robo-advisor/
