Initially, Maud Caillaux was not intended to start her own business. At the beginning of her graduate studies, she had not drawn any professional project: “I headed for very generalist studies where I could study as much history and French as mathematics and science”, she says. After her HEC preparation in Dijon then her master’s degree at the Grenoble management school, the young Dijon native is looking at all costs for her first professional experience in the luxury sector. With determination, she succeeds. She then frequents big houses such as Berluti and Dior. A little girl’s dream that turns into a nightmare. “Behind the glitter, the reality is quite different and I was not ready to trade my sanity for the kind of aura that surrounds us when we say that we work in luxury”she explains.
Faced with ecological challenges
Her experience in fashion ended after a year. In 2018, his career plan took a sharp turn. The young woman, then aged 24, dreams of working and living abroad. Through a contact at the Grenoble School of Management, she applied for a position… in a bank. It was a success and she then flew to New York. The bank is not love at first sight but, on the spot, his meeting with Andréa Ganovelli allows him to rediscover the stakes of the ecological crisis. The click was already there. “I got it while listening to a podcast by Aurélien Barrau who talked about the fact that the earth had warmed up by only 5°C in 3,000 years and that that was enough to melt 3 km of ice”.
As a woman, Maud Caillaux also thinks about the future of her future children: “Today I have the impression of not having the possibility of having children because they would risk not being well in this world”. And it’s because she wants to be able to tell them that she has “everything to change the situation” that the young woman embarked on the Green Got adventure, enriched by the values instilled by her father – the preservation of nature and respect for animals – and those of her mother – the ambition dictated by the “why not me “. “I’ve been 100% dedicated to trying to change climate change on my scale.”
Inspiring traditional banks
Green Got is a neo-bank born from a joint reflection with Andréa Ganovelli and Fabien Huet: “The banks direct the financial flows and the money is invested in industries that are massively linked to fossil fuels. Why ? Because the current financial system was founded at the time of industrial evolution. Since then, we have understood that we had to stop but we are in a Titanic and we are heading straight for the iceberg”. It assures: 4,000 euros in a traditional bank indirectly emits 2 tonnes of CO2 per year. And since the Paris agreement in 2015, the 60 largest global banks have allocated 4.6 trillion dollars to fossil fuels.
And since money is the sinews of war in the fight against global warming, it is possible, since 2022, to open a current account with Green Got, “a bank that does not use fossil fuels at all”. On the contrary, it invests in three projects: preserving the Amazon, cleaning up the oceans and producing low-carbon electricity using renewable energies. In four months, 7,000 people have already opened a current account with Green Got. An application allows them to directly visualize their personal impact and the impact of the community. Next step: the creation of a savings account by early 2023.
For this initiative, the young Franco-Iranian was raised to the Forbes 30 under 30 list in 2021: “an extremely strong reward and recognition of our work”. But the project is even bigger. The Green Got team has only one goal in mind: “Inspiring traditional banks. If they want to bring together customers of our generation and the next generations, they have to change”.