Context

As our first project for a new boutique client, we were tasked with creating a short pitch for a fossil-free fund that maintained a very low tracking error. The aim was to explain the process by which the client arrived at a final portfolio that performed well, maintained a low tracking error, with a significantly reduced carbon footprint. All of this had to be achieved in a 2-minute pitch for a retail audience.

Challenge

The starting point for this pitch was a single slide containing a somewhat cluttered and unintuitive graphic, shown below:

Keeping a retail audience engaged and interested with a single slide like this would be a challenge for even the most accomplished of speakers!

The graphic aims to show the evolution of the two portfolio characteristics that represent the key selling points of the fund across the steps of their portfolio construction process. It traces the journey of going from the index - which has an undesirably high level of associated carbon emissions - toward a product which has an almost fourfold lower carbon output, and a less than 1 percent tracking error.

The challenge was ultimately to retell this particular story in an engaging and visually engaging way to support the fund managers during a short elevator pitch. To make matters more interesting, all our team had to work with was the original slide and the underlying fund data!

With an oversized chunk of information as our starting point, we immediately set about breaking it down into more digestible bites that would be more palatable for the intended retail audience. Our goal was to visualize the individual exclusionary filters for each step, and dynamically illustrate the evolution of the carbon intensity and tracking error of the portfolio with every filter applied, since these two factors represented the key selling points of the fund.

The final set of slides that emerged are shown in (de-branded) action below:

The final result supports the fund manager in taking their audience with them on the journey to creating a fossil-free fund with a significantly lowered carbon footprint compared to the benchmark, while still following the index closely (i.e. maintaining a low tracking error).

Armed with a cutting-edge pitch deck, our client felt confident in their abilities to win over even the most challenging retail audience

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