About us

The Olistik Blog monitors trends, gathers resources, and shares stimulating thoughts and corporate stories, using a sustainable and ethical finance lens, including on issues such as accountability of the financiers, transparency and sustainability of financial products. Olistik believes that innovative thinking is necessary to build up a sustainable financial system that facilitates fair allocation of resources, ensuring the protection of global environmental and social common goods such as social welfare for the highest number of people, financial stability and environmental integrity.

The foundations of Olistik date back to the midst of the financial crisis. Olistik recognizes that while the wind has started to blow in the right direction in the financial and corporate realm (ie. shift of mind towards more long term-ism and accountability), promises have yet to turn into reality in the field of ethical finance.

Considering that financiers need to embark on a global approach through a systemic and comprehensive analysis of their universe of investments in order to adress social challenges, Olistik’s raison d’etre is grounded on the following principles:

- Intangibles factors (reputation; ethical integrity; culture and social value; license to operate) are material for investors to assess companies’ growth potential, at least as much as tangibles and financial factors; and can be considered as a proxy for overall management performance;
- Financial decisions should incorporate the values and ethics of its players; there currently is a blatant lack of information and tools for investors to understand the impact of their activities on social and environmental systems;
- Higher consideration should be given to non-financial matters by investors, in the vein of the responsible investment wave;
- Open and collaborative platforms and tools will enable more diverse information available to the financial players; hence increase collaborative or social intelligence;

Holism comes from ὅλος holos, a Greek word meaning all, whole, entire, total. As summarized by Aristotle in the Metaphysics: “The whole is more than the sum of its parts“. Used in different disciplines, including anthropology, biology, philosophic and economics.

By promoting the above-mentioned principles, Olistik is an endeavor to fill the gap between financial and non-financial matters for a better understanding of the global corporate picture, aka “the whole is more than the sum of its parts”, and will contribute to make the financial system more stable, sustainable and fair.