Keesa: Thank you for joining the Climate Money Work Podcast. I'm Keesa Schreane. Consultants can provide insight and information that drives products and drives markets forward. With a focus on intelligence and data, there are clear opportunities for insights on issues such as the SEC's climate rule, impending at the time of this recording, insights on security, privacy regulation, as well as the issues around pricing, supply chain, and even inclusion.

Here to discuss some of these critical issues, some solutions, and around how consultants are advising their clients are Cindra Maharaj who is a partner and an expert in finance, treasury risk, and controls at Baringa with a focus on treasury management, balance sheet management, liquidity risk, resiliency, climate and ESG.

Also, we have with us Hortense Viard, who is an expert in climate sustainability, and strategy at Baringa. Her focus includes helping global banks enhance their climate risk programs and respond to climate regulatory issues as well as providing strategic advisory and building climate risk target states.

Keesa: Thank you, Cindra and Hortense, for joining us.

Hortense: Thank you.

Cindra: Thanks so much for having us.

Keesa: First, to set the stage, share who your clients are and who the prospects are, and also, what are their biggest concerns? What are you hearing from your clients?

Cindra: Yeah, maybe I'll go first. So Keesa, when you ask, “who are our clients?” let me tell you a little bit about Baringa to start off with. So Baringa Partners is a global management consulting firm. We're headquartered out of the U. K. with reach across the U.S. As well as within Asia, and when you ask me who our clients are, that's a pretty big topic for me to kind of get into. It's a little bit around financial services. So that's a big chunk of our clients. Hortense and I both sit within our financial services practice, but Baringa as a whole, works really closely with energy and resources clients.

So if you think of some of the big names there, we're definitely working with them, as well as within the products and services space. So here within the U.S. those are three of our key industries that we work in. As I mentioned to you, financial services is sort of what Hortense and myself, our bread and butter.

Well, who within the financial services do we work with? It's across the spectrum. So it's with the large, global, systemically important banks. It's with what we call the regional banks, and I'm sure we can get into a little bit about what's going on within that sector right now, as well as within the investment management and private equity space. So we really kind of cover that whole gamut. I know Hortense can talk a little bit about some of the work we're doing in the insurance space as well.

Keesa: Great. Excellent. So I'm hearing from a banking perspective, I’m hearing likely climate scenario analysis issues are being discussed. From an insurance perspective, physical climate risk, I'm sure those are issues being discussed. Hortense, tell us about some of the major issues that you're seeing with insurers right now as it relates to various types of insurance, whether we're talking about those who have mortgages as well as more business and commercial related issues.

Hortense: Yeah, so on the insurance side, we're seeing some of the major issues being across the spectrum of the climate and sustainability journey. So if I start with the climate risk side, for example, it's climate risk integration into the entire operating model processes.When we talk about climate risk and integration, it's really thinking about, “how does climate impact my insurance portfolio?” and leveraging tools and capabilities such as scenario analysis to really understand the impact so that's one part of the issue that insurers are having. 

When we talk about scenario analysis, capabilities, and tools, it's usually used for both physical risk and transition risk, right? So we all often hear about insurance issues around climate from a physical risk standpoint, but there also holds a transition risk aspect that needs to be assessed by insurers.

Obviously disclosures is one of their important challenges at the moment. You mentioned SEC at the beginning of this podcast. It's obviously at the forefront of everyone's mind, what the final rule is going to be about, what it means to comply with the SEC rules, and what it means to comply with all the other frameworks and reporting standards out there.

So the climate risk integration and the disclosure aspect are probably the two main elements that insurers have in mind at the moment.

Keesa: So let's speak specifically about how you were advising your clients as it relates to the SEC rule. Are there certain areas that you say now, even before the rule comes down, that we are certain that these are going to be some key areas that we need to look at specifically as it relates to scope 3 emissions?

I know that's been largely something that's been discussed, but what source, if you could have a three or five point plan of those things you've been talking about with insurers, with banks, and even with institutional investors, what do those three to five points look like? Most important points of the SEC's rule.

Cindra: Yeah, maybe I'll take it, and then Hortense, feel free to jump in here. A couple of things there, Keesa, I'd say, Hortense mentioned scenario analysis activities. So the idea of being able to assess the resilience of climate related risks and the required disclosures, but when we talk about scenario analysis, it's also the idea of including the parameters, the assumptions, the analytical analysis that's coming along with the impacts from the scenario. So when you think about it, it's not just being able to create the results, but sort of the narrative that goes with it is really important, so that's one. 

You mentioned Scope 3 kind of coming into play, well, that's really important,  and then being able to start to think about if you have set a decarbonization plan, the disclosure of your scope 3 targets as well as disclosures of your transition plans. I think there's also something around the board and the climate risk expertise within your board and the governance around that.

Then last but not least, it's the piece around materiality, which has been a big sticking point when we think about the SEC rules, is that any climate costs that are really at that 1% materiality threshold needs to be reported, and why is that a sticking point is that it differs to the 5% materiality threshold that firms typically adhere to within their financial statements.

Keesa: So if we were to drive deeper into these three points, the point being scenario analysis as well as the impacts from the scenarios, and building the narrative that goes along with it. I'm assuming we're talking about what's being reported and not necessarily only the quantitative elements, but building the narrative, meaning the qualitative points of what's happening as well as what we're doing, what the bank is doing in these scenarios.

The second piece, the decarbonization plan disclosing scope 3, is a very important thing to do. Then again, I'd love to get your thoughts on this. I'm assuming this means advising clients: hey, if there is something missing, alert your teams and let the report disclose that there is something missing.

Let the report disclose the governance and board issues, and then number three, the materiality. Are my assumptions correct about those things, that you were advising your clients, or specifically, what are you advising your clients on these three points about? What are you telling them they should do as a best practice?

Cindra: Yeah, so just in terms of the materiality, I would say the number three is really around the board expertise. It's really a big one, and sort of the idea of: how do you start to build that expertise within your organization starting at the board level?  

So one of the key areas that we definitely focus in on and have been talking to a lot of our clients on, is around the idea of training. How do you start to get climate training? How does that start to distill throughout your organization and starting at the board level, but also being embedded within your risk organization? It's really closely linked though, to the points on the decarbonization strategy that we talked about, and there's a lot of work that we've done and that we're advising our clients on. Hortense can bring this to life for us a little bit in terms of working with front office working, with the bankers, thinking about the different sectors. So maybe, Hortense, if you want to kind of jump in there.

Hortense: Yeah, absolutely. We're going to touch on the different points that you mentioned, actually, Keesa, by going through training because training is a quite broad ask, but when we think of training at Baringa, especially when we think about training the front office and the bankers, so the client facing team, we always think about training from a value creation and monetization opportunity side, which is extremely important. It's actually an interesting difference and dynamic that we are seeing if we compare Europe and the U.S. 

Europe and the U.K have driven the climate agenda through the regulations, whereas in the U.S., the climate agenda has been mostly driven by the opportunity side, which I think is super interesting when you think about it.

At the end of the day, financial institutions, banking institutions, have to drive P&L, and value creation. So the way we are approaching training for our clients is pretty much helping them understand what their clients transition journey is about, and it goes through understanding what we call that credible transition plan assessment. So going through a framework, which is really engaging with the clients through a framework and understanding what they're planning to do,  and do they have enough CapEx to actually support that transition? Is it credible as a plan? And then based on that, helping clients to think about the opportunities.

How do they need to engage with our client? What type of projects do they need to propose to their clients? What type of products? How can they leverage the Inflation Reduction Act to generate new opportunities? It's not the same way to engage laggards in terms of transition versus a pioneer.

That’s how we try to upscale front office and bankers. When we train board committees, because a lot of our work around the SEC is also to train board members, because it's one of the asks around the SEC, this is the exact same topic. The board members are very quickly bored if you only talk about ESG and climate in the lens of regulation. It's not necessarily a topic that they really enjoy hearing. What they really like to hear is, yes, there is a regulation and goal, obviously, but there is also an opportunity, and you don't want to lose the opportunity to grow your business and to create value.

Keesa: So this is great in terms of the training piece. I would really like to get into the scope 3 piece because, you know, you hear corporate saying this is nearly impossible. How can we do this? So in talking to corporations and leaders who think it's really not easy to measure this, is this going to be asked of us? where do we start? What is the advice for them?

Hortense: Cindra, I might take this one to begin with, and then feel free to jump in. I'm wondering if it's worth maybe explaining what scope 3 is before I get into details because I know that one of the things in the ESG and climate space is, the love of using a bunch of acronyms.

So maybe just incurring into what scope 3 is. So it’s the greenhouse gas protocol, which is a widely accepted standout for accounting and reporting around greenhouse gas emissions, categorizes emissions into three scopes:

So scope 1, which is direct emissions from company owned assets. Scope 2, which are indirect emissions from the company. Scope 1 and scope 2 are relatively easy I would say to gather, but the challenge is around scope 3, which is basically all indirect emissions in the company's value chain. That contains scope 3, by itself, contains 15 different categories, so that doesn't help. Some examples of these categories are, business travels and finance emissions.

I'm going to pause on financial emissions and dive on the financial emissions because this is where there are a lot of issues on the financial services side. If you think about financial emission on the financial institution side, that's where the majority of their emissions are across scope1, scope 2, scope 3 emissions.

Essentially, for an example of a bank, we're asking the bank to account for the number of emissions that they're actually supporting through their loans, through their funding. So it's huge, depending on the size of the company, but it can be quite huge. So what we're seeing in terms of challenges, and you highlighted like the overall data challenge, but it's a little bit specific across the data challenge.

We're seeing different challenges such as data collection and the verification of the data. So think about data quality because the scope 3 emissions originate from a very wide range of activities across the value chain that can involve numerous suppliers, numerous customers and numerous partners together the  data from. For example, we actually supported one of our clients recently in their scope 3 emissions calculation, and it was just business travel, not even finance emission. It took literally, probably, three months to go and get to each of their suppliers, ask them the data, come with a strong and robust framework, excel spreadsheet, and it's not necessarily on our consulting side because we have the framework in place. It was more on the client side, gathering all their supplier names, gathering exactly who they had to reach out with on the supplier side. If you're trying to get some data around a specific lease, for example, who are you going to ask? So it takes a lot of time to really identify who are the people you need to talk to.

Then from a client and finance submission side, it takes time to also engage with your clients, specifically, and that goes back to the training piece, which is the way we are helping clients getting through their data collection, and especially for the missing data that they cannot have through vendors, is to define how they get to their clients in a meaningful way.

So not just to ask them, “oh, can you please provide more data so I can actually calculate my scope 3 financial missions? I'd like to understand better the data around scope 3 because I can inform you better on new type of technology, new type of products that we can actually help you through.

So that forms an entire client engagement strategy, which helps with social data collection. There is one other piece, which is around the standardization of data. So, yes, it's difficult to get the data. It's difficult to verify the data quality. It's difficult to engage your clients to gather more data, but it's also difficult to come up with a very consistent way of looking at those data, the reporting  methods and the metrics for emissions data vary depending on the data sources, depending on the providers, et cetera. So it can be very challenging.

So the way we're helping clients is to make sure that they come with the right set of methodologies, and they are very clear in terms of how they want to calculate those scope 3 emissions. What are the methodologies they want to use? Then they can actually set their own standard in terms of the way they gather data.

Cindra: If I can just add on to that for two seconds. I think, Keesa, that's bringing up actually an additional layer of like, when you ask us what we are advising clients on, and the conversation that's coming up and work that we're doing. So just given the current environment that we're in right now, especially within the financial services space. Cost optimization or cost of business is getting higher, so we know interest rates are rising. Cost of funding is increasing for a lot of some of those middle tier banks, even investment managers. So what this is breeding is actually an opportunity for firms.We talk about P&L generation, they are profit generation, but it's also breeding an opportunity for firms to start to go down like data optimization. So we're seeing a lot of strategies starting to move with some of our firms being driven by this agenda going down the part of how do I start to rationalize my data? Should I start to undertake more of these cost optimization programs, right? Standardization programs on that's coming into play.

Keesa: While we're talking about data, I want to move over into data more broadly. So we're talking about physical risk data, but if we look at the broad data landscape, you have the physical climate risk data, but you also have ESG rankings and the sub data, if you will, the data that goes into the rankings. 

We also have data around boards and directors, companies, or not for profit specifically, that see various issues with the work that some corporations are doing. We have media data that gives a ranking in terms of whether different media they're speaking positively or negatively about a company or issues.

So sanctions whether it's company sanctions, and also that could be a part of the G, governance, in ESG, and the issue as well as the social. So we see a broad range of data is what we're trying to say here. Have you seen a way that your clients have used data in a very unique way to find solutions? Looking at the various types of data that we have to offer now?

Hortense: I'm happy to start, Cindra, and feel free to jump in. I think one very, I don't know if it's innovative, but the great way we've seen the client doing, which was very different than the other ones, was they created this centralized ESG and climate data hub, which was essentially a new centralized platform for all their climate and ESG data. Which is very different from what we're seeing other clients doing because most of our clients, even if it's smaller entities, smaller companies, or larger companies, they tend to go after the data depending on the need at the moment.

So well, disclosures requirements, well, I need the data points for this disclosure. Well, actually CSRD disclosures, which are the new European disclosures. I need another set of data for these disclosures, and not necessarily thinking about the data in a strategic way, but really more about if I have a need, I need to ask the data team to bring me new data sets. At the end of the day, we're seeing clients struggling after six months to a year in their ESG and climate data journey because they realize that they haven't rationalized, at all, their data sets and they have duplicate information, they have data that says that all the titles of the same, but are not necessarily calculated the same way.

So again, having this idea of a centralized ESG and climate data hub being driven, especially by use cases, and I'm insisting on the word “use cases” because that's something that not a lot of clients are essentially doing properly. So drive the client use case and define what data needs to be brought in based on this use case.

It's been very efficient because this climate and ESG data hub usually have one ownership, one client, climate and ESG data owner, who is driving the entire data strategy for the company. So that is, this client is one of the only clients that I've seen doing it yet. The other ones are marching toward that, but everybody was in such a rush to get data. It was all about ESG data, climate data, not necessarily thinking about how they would use it.

Keesa: So we have the clients, we have the investors or the bankers, the insurers, but the vendors who are supplying the data, what can they do to number one, to ensure that there's reduced noise and there is data that actually produces insights, and number two, to make sure that the data can be received? Whether it's technically or whether it's just the knowledge on the data can be received by the leaders in these different areas to make sure that can be more effective.What can vendors do in this situation?

Hortense: So, I have a couple of thoughts and I'm sure Cindra has some as well, but, starting maybe with the ESG rating agencies, a lot of noise has been around the inconsistency across the way the ESG ratings were actually calculated. So, good news or bad news, I'm not going to take any assumption here, but I know that the EU is actually working on specific requirements around ESG rating providers to actually drive consistency around the way they are making their rating. What are the exact criteria that they are using to come with an ESG rating?

So that will definitely help to set the scene in terms of how consistent it can be brought. I know one of the challenges we've been helping clients through tis that sometimes those ESG rating vendors have a lot to do, right? They have a lot to consume in terms of disclosures to come with an ESG rating, and if they don't necessarily have the information, they won't necessarily engage with the client to get the additional information that they have.

So our client was actually struggling with their ESG rating, although they had made a lot of progress, they had made a lot of effort in their climate and ESG journey, that information wasn’t brought to life to those ESG rating providers, and so their scores are dropping, and dropping, and dropping.

They didn’t understand, so we help them come up with a very strong and robust story documentation and engage with their ESG rating providers to tell them about all the good work that they had done, but in a perfect world, you wouldn't necessarily ask the client to go talk to the ESG rating provider and agency to tell their story you, would like the mechanism to work a little bit better.

Again, I think the consistency in the frameworks that maybe we're gonna come with maturity will help in that regard. Cinda, do you wanna add something here?

Cindra: Yeah, I think that's a really good point that you just brought up there, Hortense, and it's around agility that I think is really important here. So that client that you're talking about there where we helped them, and they were doing all of this great work, right, in terms of ESG, but there was a sort of a time lag that was happening between the great work being recognized and the ESG rating sort of picking it up, and I feel like there's something there around, and I don't think, Keesa, it’s something that we have to solve for today, especially in the ESG space, but something to think about, especially within the broader banking and financial services space is around the agility and the speed of information, and that's something that we saw kind of coming in. 

You mentioned not just from a climate risk perspective, but some of the social and the governance. So some of what we saw recently with Silicon Valley Bank and some of those mid tier banks, right? There was speed of information, social media driving a lot of that and I think we're going to see more and more down that space as time comes and it also factors in, sorry, one more point.

One is speed of information, but two is what do you do with this data? So one thing is data collection, but I think there's another piece of the analysis, the reporting, the metrics that we still have to look at. I think within the climate space and the ESG space, something that's still continuing to evolve and probably will continue to evolve for a little bit.

Keesa: So what I'm hearing there is being mindful of big data. If we define big data as high volume, high velocity, as well as high veracity. Hopefully, big data is something that should be kept in mind. You mentioned earlier about being future focused. For those leaders who want to be strategic about the data that they purchase, they want to be strategic about how they analyze it, but they may be having issues about what are the right questions to ask to make sure that I am future focused? How should I look at things to make sure I am strategic? It comes with the shift in mindset, quite frankly, for some folks.

What sorts of questions do they need to ask? How can they be strategic? How can they be future-focused? What needs to be top of mind for them? How do they need to change their thinking to make sure that the data and the analysis is in fact strategic, and it is, in fact, some that can solve for future issues?

Cindra: I think we can approach that question in multiple ways, Keesa, to be honest. When you ask that in terms of how do you change mindset to become future thinking? That's a really hard question. I think I come from a background very much within the risk and regulatory space. I think about stuff very much from financial resource management. So for me, I kind of start at that bottom level and sort of say, okay, well, what is that risk reward that we're starting to think about? And build it up from there. 

That's why it's so important. You can't do that on your own. There's something around teams and there's something around having the right people around you. So, as I said, I start at the bottom starting off with, you know, a strong risk mitigation thinking, but I can guarantee you, I advise my clients to sort of make sure they have in the room somebody else who's a little bit more future thinking and who's looking at some of those market trends, who's thinking about stuff a little bit differently, who's looking at those big data trends.

So one of my big things is when we're thinking about how do we make this mind shift is a little bit as leaders surrounding ourselves with sort of that diversity of thought is really, really important to bring to the table because I think where we're going as an as an industry, where we're going as a broader from a macroeconomic, it's really hard to try and solve some of this in silos right now, and an important way to do that is to bring others in.

Hortense: Maybe if I can add a little bit here. I'll go back to one thing that I mentioned earlier, which is around the use cases. I keep mentioning and insisting on that because, again, if you want to be strategic about your data, you need to be strategic about the needs. One of the questions that the regulators have around integration of climate into the operating model is ultimately they'd like to see the climate consideration being included into the strategic planning of a company. How do you get to integration into strategic planning is only if you get accurate, reliable data that you can take action on, and looking back to the use cases going to the business, going to the to the risk management team, going to the finance team, and asking them in the next five years, “what are the key use cases that you're going to have to solve for in the ESG and climate space?”

And the use case is a little bit higher level and very detailed requirements. I'm on the risk management side. I know that I'm going to have to monitor  my climate risk properly. I need to identify my risk around climate and ESG, I need to assess my risk around climate and ESG, and I'm going to have to report on it and define some key risk indicators and thresholds. That’s the definition of a use case. On the front of each side, I need to be able to generate new opportunities and make sure that I'm leveraging Inflation Reduction Act incentives and I engage properly with my client.

That's use cases, so, the strategic way of approaching data is really taking the lens of use cases, in my mind.

Keesa: Okay, let's talk about revenue generation. Let's talk about some of the interesting conversations that you're having with clients about new ways to generate revenue that have to do perhaps with new ways that we're looking at energy, new ways that we're looking at pricing, or even dealing with supply chain issues and how we're going to be turned on its head, so geopolitical issues. So let's look at revenue generation in terms of some of these new economic geopolitical realities that we have here. What have you seen in terms of dynamic, sustainable revenue generation opportunities that have really come from this new economic and geopolitical reality that we're in now?

Hortense: One thing that Cinda mentioned, Keesa, which is important to bear in mind, especially as wish we were thinking about the opportunity side, and bearing in mind that both Cindra and I are an advising financial services institution, is that we have a very strong energy and resources team both here in the U.S. and globally. Part of the way we're advising our clients is to bring our two words together and bring the best of our skill sets. So we talk of the regulatory and disclosure exercise, and as I mentioned before, the way we think about the Asian climate agenda is very much about the opportunity side because at the end of the day, it's all about risk and opportunities.

Obviously, we've seen the U.S. Making a huge push in the clean energy investment through the Inflation Reduction Act, which was signed into law I think a year ago by now. Essentially, what it is about is its 400 billion clean energy stimulus, which will mobilize 1.2 trillion in direct investment in the next decades and bring energy, finance, and sustainability opportunities together.

So when we think about it, the Inflation Reduction Act incentives are going to drive further renewable development and increase activity in more recent sectors including hydrogen, carbon capture, storage and clean tech manufacturing. 

So all those new technologies, these new activities, that's where we're bringing our energy and resource team to take a look at the U.S. new technology map and the roadmap ahead and really help the bankers and our clients to identify where they want to put their bets and to really understand what it means because our global climate risk lead very often says green doesn't mean not risky. So doens’t mean because it's a hydrogen company, it's not risky.

So always keeping that lens, as well, which is, yes, it's clean, yes, it's green, but is it risky? Is it a good approach for the financial institution? Our team is really focusing on those topics and our team is actually helping bankers to sometimes go in front of their credit committee to explain to them why this deal or why this transaction is a opportunity as good for the company? So we're really working in partnership with the front of his team.

Keesa: And this is great. I think if we look at some key issues that we're talking about a lot today, we really need to talk a bit about AI, regenerative AI, and how that is playing a role in moving clients forward, how it's playing a role in helping to generate revenue, and helping to generate insights.

Have you really started having deeper discussions around sort of AI? What are your clients saying? Are they frightened? Are they excited? What's the reaction?

Cindra: I think I'll take that, Hortense, and jump in. So definitely a topic of interest that we're seeing within our client space. You know, funny enough, Hortense mentioned use cases a lot in talking here, and I think you were mentioning, Hortense, a lot of use cases that relates to climate, but what I'm starting to see within our space is a lot of excitement around Gen AI.

A lot of thinking around the different use cases that are applicable. So sort of starting to map across an institution front to back, what are those applicability thinkings around that, or use cases around that? I don't think it's as far in terms of the embedding as we have been thinking about with climate, but there is a lot of discussion happening right now around the overall, how do I start to think about digital risk within my overall risk management framework?

So funny enough, you mentioned that because I think of Gen AI, I think of digital risk as sort of another emerging risk that's coming into play. So just as the path we've been down, or we're going down within the climate risk space, and we've been talking a lot about the embedding of that, we're starting to look at the same thing within the Gen AI space, and how is that manifesting right now? Well, it's manifesting within, how do I start to think about this within my compliance frameworks? So how do I start to think about it within my operational risk frameworks? What type of controls do I need to put into place?

Is there upscaling of my teams that I need to do this with? Depending on who you're talking to within an organization, it's gonna be a little bit of a different conversation.

Keesa: So operational risk as well as potentially creating efficiencies in the operation?

Cindra: 100%. 100%. 

Keesa: Okay, okay.

Cindra: We're definitely seeing that coming in terms of the process simplification, right? Compliance functions starting to use like in the old days, well, it's not that old, but we have the idea of chatbots- well, those chatbots are now starting to evolve with Gen AI.

So a lot to come from that, I think, in that space.

Keesa: So Baringa recently received the honor, and it was from Forbes of a world's best management consulting firm in 2023. What differentiates in your mind consulting firms, consultants, when it comes to supporting these climate goals, supporting and understanding of risks and really helping the clients to get to where they are?

What's the key differentiator between consultancies, whether they're midsize or smaller, to really support the client?

Cindra: Yeah, great question. I'm sure Hortense and I can both take that question in different ways and give a little bit of our experience. So that's something that we're really proud of in terms of that recognition, but a couple of things from our perspective. So one, for Baringa, we're actually a B-Corp Certified consulting firm, and one of the few, right, that can say that.

So that's something that shows you mentioned sustainability. People and sustainability are built into our processes and how we think about our business. We really look at our business for the long-term value, right? Really thinking about it from that perspective. So that's one, but I think what also distinguishes us is not just our people agenda, but it's the fact, and hopefully you're hearing it a little bit on this call, we love to say it, it’s our subject matter expertise, a little bit of our geekiness in the different areas that we love to be in.

I think if you talk to other people in Baringa, we actually go around saying that we are geeky. So I think that's another one, you're really getting people working with us who are rolling up their sleeves and deep into the subject matter content.

I think that's a testament to me and Hortense being here today, right? We sort of bring out blends of our skill sets together, so that’s another one. Then last but not least, and I know this is going to sound a little different, it's just in terms of how we work. So we tend to go out, we're working with our clients, advising, sitting right next to them at all levels of the organization.

So the majority of our team have experience working either in the industry and who can come in and who have sat in the seat of the client before. So that's where, from Baringa's standpoint, and you kind of mentioned a little bit about mid-size and sort of thinking about it that way, I think we're different to others and differentiate ourselves.

Keesa: So to both Hortense and Cindra, our final question, tell us one thing we didn't know about strategic planning. What can make it successful? What is the top key ingredient, or if there's a top three? Tell us something that we did not know about strategic planning and success.

Cindra: From my perspective, there's something that we've been talking a lot about internally here in Baringa, and it's really around this idea of the connective tissue. When you talk about strategic planning, it can't be done in a bubble.

You need to do it with different skill sets coming to the table, different strengths coming to the table. I mentioned diversity of thought coming to the table. I think that is really, really important to think about and to have. 

Hortense: And the data-driven approach. We talked about a lot of data. Strategic planning and integration cannot be done without the right data and the right level of data quality, so thinking carefully and strategically about which data to get involved in and how it actually informs strategic planning and decision making.

Keesa: Excellent. So from data to really being able to focus in on specific areas, strategy really means being all in all present and diving in. I appreciate you answering that question on strategy for those who are Michael Porter fans, they would say, well, strategy and planning or stack tactics, those are different things, but you answered the strategy piece right on.

I do appreciate that. Cindra, Hortense, thank you so much for joining

Hortense: Thank you so much.

Cindra: Thanks so much.