Stefania Di Bartolomeo was an early proponent of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing movement when she started Physis seven years ago. Her mission was to show just what companies were doing with the money investors gave them to fight climate change and encourage diversity – to bring transparency to sustainable investors.
The Italian-born, Harvard-educated fund manager rode the wave of ESG in the early 2020s but then suffered, like many others, as President Donald Trump returned to the White House with a vow to stamp out climate change investing. Suddenly business was drying up and ESG was a banned word on Wall Street. Even worse for Di Bartolomeo, a few of her tech team staff from India were even stopped on the Harvard campus by ICE agents looking to expel immigrants.
The situation called for a turnaround, and so Di Bartolomeo embraced the AI movement and has spent the last year restructuring Physis into a data infrastructure business with a sustainability focus. A new website and platform are set to be launched this month, which importantly will allow the transparent data information the company had been selling to large investors to be available on a subscription level for smaller investors.
The new platform will also allow investors to build their own data bases to track the metrics of companies they invest in, including sustainable data but also other important financial, legal, and geographic information.
Physis, which was named after the Greek word for nature, has also partnered with Google on data and introduced an AI-powered Chatbot that allows users to let AI guide them through all of the analysis it offers on potential companies to invest in.
“Every analysis we do will tell you the pros and cons of where a company positions itself against competitors, but with a sustainability lens,” Di Bartolomeo says in an interview from her native Italy. “And for our subscriptions plans, instead of just institutions for $25,000 (£18,500) we can offer some access to small investors for as little as $99 (£73) a month.
“Before we focused on sustainability,” she adds. “Now we have a broader data capability – with sustainability, even (ESG) skeptics will see that they need the information.”
Like every financial services executive in the last few years, Di Bartolomeo has had to adapt to the AI boom and be competitive while still hanging on to part of the original mission. Moving beyond sustainability and adapting its core principles to AI represents a new strategy that Di Bartolomeo hopes will keep her company at the forefront of the new wave of data-focused investing.
But she still wants to make sure that the company adheres to its original purpose of helping investors track where their investing dollars are going once they purchase a company’s stock. How those companies apply the funds is a unique window of data that Physis offers.
Di Bartolomeo said her commitment to diversity remains iron clad, even as potential clients and vendors said they had turned away from it for fear of political retribution. At one point she considered selling the company but decided instead to double-down and work to expand its technological offerings.
“It’s been crazy, and I don’t even live in [conservative] Texas. I live in [liberal] Boston,” she said.
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