Inside the minds of the millennials

Louise, you’re a professional entrepreneur, an investment company boss. What did the organisation do for you in terms of inspiring you to take on responsibility in your family business? 

Louise Huterstein I was very fortunate to grow up with parents who really integrated my sister and I into the family business. We talked about business decisions all the time and how they were making them and the culture they instilled at the company.

It wasn’t until I joined the YIO at 18, where I really got incredible access to, not just fantastic members from different walks of life and from different industries, but also incredible speakers and educational opportunities.

I have been pretty stubborn since I’ve been young about the kind of world I’d like to live in and the YIO helped form how I achieve that through investment and entrepreneurial activities. Hearing how members view the world and the experiences they’ve had also influenced the kind of investment decisions I make. 

But was there this key moment when you thought, “I’m not sure whether I can work with my parents’ business anymore, I want to start my own business and go it alone”?

Louise Huterstein I always loved the hospitality industry and real estate. Making people happy makes me really happy and my parents instilled that in me. But I’ve always had other outside interests as well. Sometimes the real estate industry, especially during a downturn like the global financial crisis, can give you a little bit of extra time. That’s when I started my investment company to invest in early stage companies, run by passionate people who were going to change the world in ways that I knew myself I couldn’t do personally.

That’s where my love for impact investing really started. It was fostered by long discussions about how we think we should be able to do good and not just create wealth to then give it away later.

Fernando you’re a passionate advocate of impact investing and some of your colleagues describe you as the go-to man for impact investing. Can this discipline be more profitable in terms of rates of return than traditional investments?

Fernando Scodro Absolutely. When you consider that I put my financial return on one side and the social or environmental return on the other, it really becomes a double return type of investment. For families especially this is a very attractive model, because we have a mandate to think generationally. I’m thinking of the grandchildren that I will have without even being married now. We don’t think quarterly. We don’t have that pressure to deliver immediate results. It can absolutely be a more profitable way of investing.

There are three dividends we are talking about here, and maybe a fourth dividend because you can become involved with universities. You can influence their curriculum and the way of thinking. Do you feel that members, private clients and banks can become actors who can influence and set the social agenda?

Fernando Scodro I do think so. Universities play a very important role. Academia in general is considered a very good neutral actor where this kind of conversation can happen. Impact investing is so new, and so uncomfortable sometimes for people to speak the language, because we have on one side the capital and on the other side the adviser. Academia is one of the ways to mediate this dialogue. 

Private banks are playing a very different role today than they did maybe 20 years ago, when they were considered stale institutions obsessed with secrecy, providing a white glove service. Louise, you’ve grown up in Switzerland. Have you seen that role change quite significantly?

Louise Huterstein Yes, the time of the Swiss banker in the Bond movies no longer exists. But I think it is the right thing.

Swiss banking institutions are perfectly poised to help people like us who are focused on legacy, not just maintaining what our parents created but also creating something for our own children. Bigger institutions are now taking serious notice of the tech side of things and it doesn’t make sense that you should be able to go to a small institution that doesn’t have that legacy. We have personal relationships with our RMs, and they offer us a bespoke service. It’s something that I really appreciate and my family feels secure knowing I’m going to be looked after in that way as well.

Fernando Scodro The conversations that our RMs have with my father are completely different to the ones they have with me. I really want to see where my money is going, and what kind of consequences it is having when it’s being deployed. My father likes that kind of question as well, but he wants the financial return first. I want to see them side-by-side.

The YIO was founded just before the financial crisis and you, Elsie, were the founding president. Is it a very different organisation today than we saw in the early days?

Elsie Mullers A lot has changed since then but it doesn’t necessarily have to do with the financial crisis, more so the attitudes, the changing environment and beliefs around finance and next generation programmes. Clients are looking for an additional value from the bank. 

There is a cycle, the first generation makes the wealth, the second generation keeps it and the third generation loses it. That was why we wanted to educate the next generation. 

You’re involved in business yourself, you’re director of international business development for a group of companies. How prepared are businesses for the transfer of assets and responsibilities to the next generation? 

Elsie Mullers Many still haven’t tackled that question. People tend to think they’re going to live longer than they actually are. Many consulting companies are popping up to help with that transfer of business from one generation to the next, but I believe there is still room to tackle that question more, especially with changing regulations around succeeding generations taking over.

Melissa, you’re a lawyer, and during your tenure as president of the YIO, you introduced some very strong legal principles to the organisation. You introduced the whole structure, regional and hub managers. Is this an organisation allowing members to share investment opportunities through some kind of global grid, matching sellers to buyers so they interact and make investments more efficiently?

Melissa S. Rossi de Lima We get to know each other first, in very simple and discrete ways, and we then start asking about the business. But we are not so business-oriented. First is the friendship, that’s the base, and then if you feel comfortable about it, you start doing business with each other.

Are serious deals made at these forums or does that happen elsewhere?

Melissa S. Rossi de Lima That happens. This time one of the YIOs asked me to go through some legal work documents. I had to analyse a contract today, and they closed the deal, but in a very discrete way.

You’re also encouraging members to partner with NGOs and other institutions to drive social impact. How does that take place?

Tyler Barth In order to grow an organisation, you find like-minded partners that you can learn from and build bridges, finding ways of solving the world’s problems.

Legacy is something that we address all the time and it’s one thing that you have to think about. 

Some of our families are very well known, and while maintaining and sustaining the wealth and the legacy of the family, we trigger and influence the spirit of entrepreneurship in our members.

Inside the YIO there is this family feeling of trust and we can make some magic happen daily and that’s what we’ve been doing here in Rome.

Elsie Mullers What’s interesting about our organisation is we do drive our members to do the deals but our members come in different experience ranges. You have the ones who are in that field who can make the deals and big deals happen. But there are also those who want to learn, who are maybe a little bit timid to enter the field, maybe not so sure how to live up to their parent’s expectations and so they use our organisation as a teaching method for inspiration, for how they’re going to go about their business.

Tyler Barth There is a mentoring process too. It’s something I wish I had. I know the value associated with that and it’s something we’re really working on within the organisation.