The 2015 Paris Agreement, signed by all 195 UN signatory nations, put a global focus on the impending climate emergency, with a mandate to achieve nationally determined commitments (NDCs) to exit fossil fuels and accelerate financing of global sustainability projects.

In 2016, Steve Anavi and Alexandre Prot started Qonto as a ‘challenger’ bank focused on SMEs and freelancers, in France. After achieving rapid success, questions surface about where to draw the bank’s boundaries. The early focus is on the customer interface and back-end operations are outsource, but by 2017 they are wondering whether to bring the core banking infrastructure in house.