Sustainable financing for Swiss SMEs
The Red Whale swimming school is using a Green Loan from UBS to finance two new locations while reducing its energy consumption and CO₂ emissions.
Switzerland ensures that children learn basic swimming skills with compulsory swimming lessons from the first grade. Studies also show that swimming offers many benefits for cognitive and motor development, including in infancy. Clio and Michael Elliott identified a demand and founded the Red Whale swimming school for infants and toddlers in 2018. After starting out with a single instructor in a garden pool, today they have three custom-built swimming pools in Geneva and Lausanne, employ seventy staff and teach up to 3,500 children per week.
But how can the construction of new swimming pools be reconciled with the concept of sustainability? And what financing options are available? In our interview, Clio and Michael Elliot, UBS corporate client advisor Joao-Filipe Dias Lopes and Manuel Brockhans, sustainability expert at UBS, explain the background to this project and how the Green Loan is proving to be a practical solution for Swiss SMEs in the field of sustainable investments.