The GoodStock Tapes Podcast

Simon is a former accountant and business leader who, alongside his brother Nick, established and funded an ambitious initiative to bring leading scientific and policy experts together to explain the growing risks posed by climate and nature breakdown.

Their message is that this is no longer simply an environmental issue. It is a question of economic stability, food security, national resilience and the future of our society.

For financial planners, that raises some uncomfortable questions.

What happens to long-term financial forecasts when the underlying assumptions about economic growth, functioning ecosystems and a relatively stable climate become less dependable?

Can markets accurately price risks for which there is no meaningful historical precedent? And when does discussing climate risk with clients become part of professional responsibility rather than a matter of personal opinion?

Simon explores the growing scientific concern around climate tipping points, the economic case for investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy, and why political leadership and collective action matter.

We also discuss the practical realities of introducing these conversations into client relationships, particularly when clients may be sceptical or uncomfortable.

Importantly, this isn't simply a conversation about the risks of doing nothing. It's about the extraordinary opportunity to build a healthier, more resilient and more prosperous society.

And Simon has a refreshingly straightforward message for financial planners wondering where to begin: start talking about it.

If you believe financial planning should be about protecting people's futures, not simply managing their investments, this is a conversation worth hearing.

Listen now, share your thoughts, and join the discussion about the role financial planners can play in creating a better future.

Financial planners prepare clients for market crashes, inflation and living to 100. But what happens when the greatest threat to their financial future is something our models have never experienced before?

National Emergency Briefing co-founder Simon Oldridge joins The GoodStock Tapes to explore why climate and nature breakdown could change everything we assume about risk, wealth and the future of financial advice.

Is cash really a neutral part of a client's financial plan or have we become so focused on investment portfolios that we've overlooked the impact of the money sitting in bank accounts?

In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, we are joined by Ed Siegel, Chief Executive of Charity Bank, for a thought-provoking conversation about ethical banking, social investment and the responsibility that comes with managing other people's money.

Ed's journey into purpose-driven finance was anything but conventional. Having started his career in commercial banking at Credit Suisse in the United States, he reached a point where financial success no longer felt personally fulfilling.

A move into development finance in Romania opened his eyes to the transformative power of access to capital. Nearly three decades later, following almost ten years at Big Issue Invest, Ed leads Charity Bank, where savers' money is used to finance charities, social enterprises and organisations addressing some of the UK's most pressing social and environmental challenges.

In this episode we explore a fundamental question for financial planners and wealth managers: if we take care to understand what our clients' investment portfolios contain, shouldn't we be equally curious about what their cash deposits support?

The conversation moves beyond the labels of ethical investing and ESG to examine what genuinely intentional finance looks like in practice. Ed explains how Charity Bank assesses lending applications, why a compelling social mission cannot compensate for an unsustainable business model, and how blended finance can combine grants and loans to help worthwhile projects become financially viable.

He also shares moving examples of the organisations Charity Bank supports, including safe accommodation for women escaping domestic violence and supported living for vulnerable young adults.

For advisers, the discussion raises practical questions about client values, impact transparency, financial returns and whether purpose-driven products deserve a more deliberate place in financial planning conversations. Perhaps most importantly, Ed reminds us that financial discipline and social purpose need not be opposing forces.

This is an intelligent, occasionally challenging exploration of what happens when we become more intentional about the money entrusted to us because every pound has an impact. The question is whether it's the impact we want.

Listen now, and join the conversation about how financial planning can help make money a force for good.

Sustainable investing has been on quite a journey. From a relatively niche investment approach to enormous inflows, followed by performance challenges, accusations of greenwashing and an increasingly vocal backlash.

Perhaps the real obstacle to sustainable investing becoming mainstream isn't whether clients care about it. Perhaps it's whether financial advisers have the confidence, tools and investment solutions to turn those preferences into meaningful portfolios.

In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, Adam welcomes James Stewart and Tim Crockford, childhood friends and co-founders of Bamboo Invest, a sustainable model portfolio service designed specifically for financial advisers.

James brings nearly two decades of experience working with advisers and wealth managers, including roles at Vanguard and Dimensional. He remembers trying to persuade sceptical UK advisers of the benefits of index investing when passive funds were still far from universally accepted. Today, he sees intriguing parallels with sustainable investing.

Tim approaches the debate from a different perspective. Having spent much of his career researching companies and managing sustainable and impact equity portfolios, including co-founding the impact team at Hermes and subsequently leading global equity impact investing at Regnan, he offers a refreshingly investment-led perspective on the subject.

Together, they explore some uncomfortable questions.

Can sustainable investing stand on its investment fundamentals alone? Has the industry sometimes allowed compelling sustainability narratives to overshadow valuation and risk? And why do advisers still find it so difficult to establish what their clients genuinely value?

The conversation also examines the coming intergenerational transfer of wealth and what happens when younger beneficiaries inherit their parents' money, but not necessarily their relationship with the family financial adviser.

This is a conversation about something bigger than sustainable funds. It's about the evolution of financial advice and whether investing in line with personal values could eventually become an ordinary part of building a financial plan.

If you believe capital can be a force for good, this is a conversation worth hearing.

What happens when a client's values point towards one portfolio, but an adviser's investment judgement points towards another?

In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, Adam welcomes back Charlie French, co-founder of Etcho, for a deeper conversation about sustainable investing, values-based financial advice and the emerging possibility of delivering personalised investment portfolios at scale.

Etcho was founded to help connect wealth with individual values, working with advisers and wealth managers to understand what matters to clients and translate those preferences into investment decisions.

Charlie argues that one of the biggest barriers to sustainable investing isn't necessarily a lack of interest. It's the difficulty of having the conversation in the first place. Asking clients what they care about can open a "can of worms": competing priorities, uncomfortable trade-offs and expectations that an adviser must then find a way to deliver.

But that complexity may also be where some of the most valuable financial planning conversations begin.

Adam and Charlie explore what happens when funds carrying sustainable labels contain holdings a client doesn't expect, how advisers can help clients understand the consequences of leaning further into their values, and why personalisation shouldn't mean imposing somebody else's definition of sustainability.

The conversation then moves to a potentially bigger disruption: personalised portfolios delivered at scale. Etcho says its technology can combine client circumstances, risk, goals, values and sustainability preferences while operating within investment managers' frameworks.

If that becomes commonplace, what happens to the traditional centralised investment proposition? And could the adviser of the future spend less time operating technology, and more time being genuinely present with the client?

If this conversation made you think differently about what personalised financial advice should really mean, follow The GoodStock Tapes wherever you listen to podcasts.

And if you enjoyed the episode, leave us a review and share it with an adviser, planner or investment professional who believes capital can be used as a force for good.

The best conversations about the future of finance shouldn't stop when the podcast ends.

Sustainability is often treated as an additional question at the end of the financial planning process: a box to tick once risk, objectives and performance have already been discussed. But what would change if a client's values were considered from the beginning?

In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, we are joined by Scott Daniels, co-founder and director of Plus Group, a specialist provider of paraplanning, adviser support and technology-enabled services to UK financial planning businesses.

Scott argues that the profession must move beyond jargon-heavy labels and start asking better questions. When a client says they want their money to "do some good", they may be expressing a desire to avoid particular industries, support positive outcomes or simply feel more comfortable with the way their capital is being used. The adviser's task is to understand that meaning, test it against the client's wider objectives and create a clear evidence trail.

The conversation examines how specialist paraplanning can help translate values into structured research, suitable recommendations and personalised documentation. Scott explains why good records should show what the client said, how the adviser interpreted it, what research followed and why the eventual recommendation reflected the client's preferences.

We also consider whether environmental and climate-related risks should become a more formal part of long-term financial planning. From coastal property and insurance exposure to the idea of a "climate emergency fund", the discussion asks whether traditional approaches to risk remain sufficient for plans spanning several decades.

Finally, Scott shares a practical view of artificial intelligence. AI can capture richer meeting information, reduce administrative pressure and surface useful details, but it cannot replace the human ability to interpret nuance, ask follow-up questions and exercise professional judgement.

This is a thoughtful conversation about personalisation, Consumer Duty, sustainable investing and the infrastructure advisers need to have more meaningful conversations.

Follow The GoodStock Tapes and share this episode with someone who believes finance can be a force for good.

Who should own the infrastructure powering the transition to net zero, and how early should communities be invited into the conversation?

In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, we speak with Ciara Shannon, Founding Director of the Green Finance Community Hub and Green Finance Lead at the North West Net Zero Hub. Ciara has spent much of her career at the intersection of sustainability, impact investment and green finance, and is now helping develop Project Collette, an ambitious proposed community-led offshore wind project off the coast of Cumbria.

At approximately 1.2GW, Project Collette is conceived on a very different scale from most traditional community energy schemes. But the most interesting part of the proposition is not simply the turbines. It is the financial architecture behind them.

Ciara explains the project's Community Integrated Investment Model, designed to give local people meaningful participation from an unusually early stage while still enabling the institutional investment required for infrastructure of this size. We explore community benefit societies, community shares, governance, the idea of a restricted golden share, and how community interests might coexist with conventional project finance.

The conversation also moves beyond Project Collette itself. Why are so many sustainability professionals occupied with frameworks and measurement while potentially investable projects struggle to get through early-stage development? Why is feasibility capital so difficult to secure? And has sustainability become too focused on avoiding risk rather than enabling experimentation?

Ciara argues that there is plenty of capital looking for credible opportunities. The challenge is creating more projects that are genuinely investment ready.

For financial planners, investors and anyone interested in sustainable finance, this is a conversation about more than offshore wind. It asks a bigger question, "How might capital be structured so that the communities affected by investment become participants in it too?"

If you believe finance can be a force for good, this episode offers plenty to think about.

What does it really mean to invest for impact?

In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, Dr Alan Whittle joins Clem for a deliberately provocative hot take: much of what is currently described as impact investing for retail clients may not actually be creating meaningful additional impact.

Alan is the founder and director of Unburdened Solutions, a Chartered Financial Planner, Fellow of the Personal Finance Society and researcher specialising in sustainable finance, ethics and impact investing. His PhD explored how framing influences decision-making in advised impact investing.

Together, Alan and Clem unpack an important distinction between aligning investments with a client's values and actually directing capital towards activity that creates measurable change.

They explore the role of listed equities, stewardship and shareholder advocacy; the limitations of investment labels; and why asset managers may need to involve end investors much more seriously in their theories of change.

The conversation then moves into the less familiar world of private and community-based impact investment — where capital can potentially finance tangible projects, businesses and social outcomes, but where due diligence, liquidity and investment risk can be considerably more challenging.

For financial planners, that creates a dilemma. Clients may have surplus capital they genuinely want to use for good, yet the regulatory and technological infrastructure of mainstream advice often makes these investments difficult to research, recommend or even hold.

Alan introduces a useful idea for navigating this tension: a client's "capacity for impact", considering how much capital someone could commit to genuinely transformative investments while remaining financially secure if that capital were lost or became illiquid.

This is ultimately a conversation about curiosity, honesty and the responsibility of advisers to understand a rapidly evolving investment landscape.

If we want finance to become a more powerful force for good, perhaps we need to start by being clearer about what our money is, and isn't changing.

What if millions of people excluded from mainstream credit are not actually "bad borrowers", but people being assessed by the wrong system?

In this episode, Salad CEO Craig Pennington and Ethex's Jeroen Huysinga explore how Open Banking is changing affordability decisions and ask whether funding fairer credit could represent a genuine social impact investment opportunity.

Around 20 million adults in the UK are underserved or excluded by mainstream credit, but does that necessarily mean they cannot afford to borrow, or does it expose a weakness in the way our financial system decides who is creditworthy?`

Craig explains why conventional credit scores can provide an incomplete picture of someone's financial circumstances, particularly for renters, people with thin credit histories and those whose financial position has changed. Salad takes a different approach, using permissioned Open Banking information to assess current income, expenditure and affordability rather than relying primarily on a historic credit score.

The conversation also explores an important part of responsible lending that is easily overlooked: knowing when not to lend. Craig discusses Salad's approach to identifying financial vulnerability, signposting applicants towards organisations such as StepChange and providing access to other forms of support.

Jeroen explains why Ethex sees affordable finance as a form of direct social impact investment, how it assesses potential investees and why relatively small amounts of junior capital can help organisations such as Salad unlock considerably larger pools of lending finance.

For financial planners and advisers, however, impact cannot be considered separately from investment risk. The conversation examines illiquidity, the absence of FSCS protection, uncertain returns and the role these investments might, or might not, play within a suitably diversified portfolio.

Ultimately, this is a conversation about what responsible capital looks like from both sides of the balance sheet, who gets access to money, who provides it and what happens when we design finance around people rather than scores.

If you believe capital can play a constructive role in tackling financial exclusion, this is an episode worth hearing.

If you enjoyed this conversation, follow The GoodStock Tapes wherever you listen to podcasts and leave us a review.

And if this episode made you think differently about credit, financial inclusion or the way capital is allocated, share it with a financial planner, adviser or investor who believes finance can be a force for good.

Politics can often feel tribal, exhausting and designed to keep people at a distance. But what if the answer is not to shout louder, but to listen better?

In this episode of The Good Stock Tapes, we speak with Anthea Simmons — campaigner, citizen journalist, co-founder of the South Devon Primary, founder of Common Ground, and editor-in-chief of West Country Voices — about what she has learned from talking to people face to face in communities across Devon. Her work starts from a simple but powerful belief: there is more that unites us than divides us.

Anthea shares how Common Ground uses a straightforward sticker-board format to invite non-confrontational conversations about democracy, misinformation, political identity and the rise of the far right. She reflects on why so many people are still hungry for healthier democratic engagement, even when they feel disappointed by mainstream politics, and why gentle correction can be more powerful than point-scoring.

What does it look like when investment stops chasing abstraction and starts saving pubs, shops, football clubs and community spaces? In this conversation, Alain Demontoux and Jeroen Huysinga explore how capital can be used more deliberately, not just to generate returns, but to strengthen local economies and keep vital assets in community hands.

In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, we explore a simple but important question: can investing become a more practical tool for community renewal?

Joining the conversation are Alain Demontoux, Operations and FCA Compliance Manager at Co-operative and Community Finance / ICOF Community Capital, and Jeroen Huysinga, a senior investment leader at Ethex working in positive and impact-led investment. Together, they unpack the thinking behind the ICC Share Offer 2026 and what it tells us about the future of ethical investing, financial planning and purpose-driven capital. At the centre of the discussion is a model of finance that feels refreshingly tangible. Rather than treating impact as a marketing layer, ICC has spent decades providing loan finance to co-operatives and community businesses across the UK. The organisation says it has invested more than £4.4 million through 100 loans to 85 organisations, supporting community assets, social enterprise and neighbourhood regeneration. Its current raise aims to expand that revolving pool of capital and widen access through the Ethex platform. If you enjoyed this conversation, please follow The GoodStock Tapes, leave a review, and share the episode with someone who believes finance can be a force for good. The more people we bring into these conversations, the more likely it is that capital will be used with greater imagination, responsibility and purpose.