From financial services to founding her own company, discover how this inspiring CSO is challenging the norm and creating a greener world.
“You don’t need to be a tech guru to found a tech business (I am a proper luddite) you just need the right people supporting you.”
Ever wondered if your non-traditional background truly fits in the tech world? Meet Lisa Stanley a Tech Leader in Sustainable Finance and Chief Sustainability Officer at Zero and co-founder of Good With Money. Lisa’s remarkable journey shatters expectations, showing that diverse perspectives and unwavering passion truly drive innovation in unexpected ways.
In this insightful interview, Lisa shares her path from financial services PR to becoming a leading voice in sustainable finance. Discover how she’s brilliantly blending user-first technology with planet-first values at Zero, tackling not just the complexities of a growing startup but also inspiring female founder resilience and championing powerful community-led climate action. Her story is a vibrant testament to diversity in tech, proving that success is redefined by purpose, people, and a profound commitment to making a real difference.
Hi Lisa, thank you for taking the time to speak to us. Firstly, please can you start by talking me through your position at Zero?
Zero is still a relatively small team, so while my title is Chief Sustainability Officer, I’m often drawn into other parts of the business.
The CSO role requires many hats, and on a day-to-day basis can involve anything from:
- Sustainability strategy to balance profit generation with our purpose
- Liaising with sustainability partners or accreditation frameworks such as B Corp
- Organising volunteering or stakeholder sessions
- Writing blogs
I might even get my calculator out to crunch our operational emissions numbers!
You said yourself, “you don’t have to come from a tech background to work in tech”. Please can you tell us more about your background and how you got to where you are now?
My background is in financial services communications. In the dial-up internet days of the early 2000s, I took my first comms role at a financial services agency supporting mainstream banks and investment managers over a consumer one promoting the likes of Tango and S Club Seven, purely because it paid more! Back then, work was pretty retro, with press releases issued by fax and price comparison sites like MoneySupermarket publishing top deals in a weekly printed newsletter.
After over 10 years agency-side in London, I moved to Bristol and in-house to ethical bank Triodos.
Finding raising two young boys incompatible with a corporate career, I left Triodos to work in the family nursery business and at the same time co-founded the website Good With Money – enlisting the support of a freelance web developer with the build.
Good With Money is still going strong today, but when Richard Theo, co-founder of Zero, told me of his plans for Zero, I couldn’t wait to get involved.
Would you say that sustainability has always been a passion of yours, and how has it shaped your career?
A strong moral compass (thank you, Catholic schooling), together with a love for and constant inspiration from the natural world, has meant that sustainability in its broadest form has always been core to how I live my life. Though I would say I only really challenged my thinking and behaviours once working at Triodos – which happened to coincide with the birth of my first child – enough to make even the most hardened climate change denier question the future of the planet.
Increasing knowledge around sustainable finance – the potential power of money for good – or bad – inspired me to set up Good With Money with a journalist friend.
Founding Good With Money – and now Zero – allowed all my beliefs to come together in my career: that money can and should do good; that women, and new mothers, can found and grow successful businesses; and that you don’t need to be a tech guru to found a tech business (I am a proper luddite) you just need the right people supporting you.
Zero is an incredible company! Please can you tell us more about the amazing work you are doing to save the planet and why we should all be turning to Zero?
Zero has been described as the love child of Triodos and Monzo. We founded Zero because we recognised there was a growing cohort of conscious consumers who weren’t being served by existing ethical banks with rather clunky user experience, or rapidly scaling neo-banks focused more on profit than purpose.
With climate change, it can be easy to get disheartened by the sheer weight of the challenge and depressed by the lack of governmental and policymaker activity. But the true power of climate action lies in community: ‘Everyone else is doing it, so why don’t I…’ With Zero, we’re keen to tap into that momentum for change. So a key element of Zero is our community – new customers are awarded Community Share Options, which we hope will act both to grow the community as well as reward its members.
The other exciting feature is GreenScore, our in-app personal environmental impact index, which helps users understand the environmental impacts of their spending both through their Zero account and other current accounts via Open Banking. Users can now contribute to carbon removal projects such as mangrove restoration and sustainable concrete development, straight from the app. Only just this week, I contributed to a carbon removal bundle to compensate for the emissions generated from my recent flight to Portugal.
You mentioned that the company is more of a “TechFin” than a “FinTech”. Please can you expand on this and tell us the importance of this?
The problem with current accounts, banking, saving, and the whole finance sector is that, as consumers, we love to not think about it! For whatever reason, we have become so inert with our finances – most of us would spend more time choosing a new sofa or phone than we do thinking about who we choose to look after our hard-earned cash, over our whole lifetime!
That’s worked in the favour of the UK’s established banks and financial services for so long now. Luckily, with the growth of brands like Monzo, we’re beginning to see that change, with a steady stream of switching away from banks or financial providers with creaking legacy systems to those with winning tech platforms.
And with that comes a more demanding customer – one that no longer needs to settle for poor customer service or a clunky website, because it can all be delivered through an app.
That said, much inertia remains, so to ensure we don’t lose the digital native generation at the very first hurdle, we have to put tech first.
The other opportunity we have with Zero, through GreenScore, is to remove finance/banking from the conversation altogether. GreenScore is about spending more mindfully. Not banking.
Before founding Zero, you were living in Thailand during COVID. Please can you tell us more about your experience?
I moved to Thailand in 2019 for my husband’s teaching job. It was the chance of a lifetime for our family (two children then aged 5 and 8) to experience a different way of life, a different culture, different ways of working, mega spicy food and consistently warm weather!
COVID was managed very differently in Thailand versus the UK. With the country’s borders closed and strict mask wearing, testing, and (standard for Thailand) rule-following in place, and despite frequent, surprise bans on the sale of moral-loosening alcohol, our lives went on pretty much as normal.
From a tech perspective, Thailand is polarised. On the one hand, cash is still very much king. On the other hand, and this developed because of and despite COVID, financial tech feels more advanced than in the UK. With a flash of a QR code, you can transfer funds to friends and family, pay for dinners on the beach or street food at a market stall, and withdraw that all-important cash from an ATM.
At the same time, extreme weather events are fairly standard. Floods regularly devastated the pineapple fields behind our flat; the beach was frequently washed away after a storm.
You are also the Founder of Good With Money and started the business with your Co-Founder when you both had very young children. Please can you tell us more about your experience?
It’s no wonder so few women founders have traditionally secured investment. Building and scaling a business is hard work, even with a partner in crime. However, after leaving Triodos, I was lucky enough to be able to draw on work in an established family business to help pay the bills while Good With Money got going. And working on GWM and the family business after leaving the 9-5 was a breath of fresh air, being able to fit work and meetings around the school run, swimming lessons and rugby tots.
Do you have any book or podcast recommendations?
As an English grad, I often have my head in a book – but always, always fiction. In the gym, I’m much more motivated by drum & bass than a discussion about climate change – however interesting it may be! I do dip in and out of the Bloomberg Green and 11FS podcasts, and I consume Substacks, newspapers and magazines so voraciously that my colleagues beg me to stop clogging up Slack with my ‘articles of interest’.
The Overstory by Booker-longlisted Richard Powers is a great novel that deals with the issue of climate change, and as a bonus, is hugely educational on the importance of a healthy arboreal and soil world to the future of our planet.
You said that “the planet cannot wait; we have to act now”, and there are better ways to make an impact than Tree Planting. How can we make a real difference?
I’m absolutely not anti-tree planting – it can be very effective and offers many co-benefits. But planting a tree alone cannot offset an individual’s or organisation’s carbon footprint, and tree planting should not be marketed as such.
I’m much more excited by the growing tech solutions for carbon removal at speed and scale. Whether that’s:
- Doubling down on mangrove and seaweed plantations
- Spreading basalt onto farmland to increase carbon sequestration
- Creating biochar from plant waste reduces the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere and increases soil and plant health at the same time.
It doesn’t all have to be tech-focused, though. For example, Wales is one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world, and there are some really exciting peatland restoration projects underway across the country.
Are there any trailblazers in the sustainability space that you are excited by currently?
Too many to mention! I was gutted to see the closure of Richard Curtis-founded campaign group Make My Money Matter – but sure the team there will go on to some amazing things.
In the start-up space, Glad is a membership scheme for individuals and employers offering Pollution Removal Plans.
And for a thought-provoking comedic approach to this most pressing challenge, I love the work of Stuart Goldsmith, AKA the Climate Comedian, and the team at Climate Science Translated (language warning: don’t watch with children around) – both use comedy to provoke and shock us into thinking about and acting on climate change.
What advice would you give anybody looking to get into the wonderful world of tech?
I’m forever annoying to more technically minded colleagues – and my 14-year-old son – but I honestly think it is possible to work in tech without being a techy. In the Oscar-Wildean situation we find ourselves in, the world of tech is simply the world, and the entire world is tech.
Lastly, can you leave us with your favourite quote?
“You make your own luck.”It reminds me to always be ready when opportunity knocks.
Thank you, Lisa, for sharing your incredibly insightful and empowering journey. Your dedication to a purpose-driven future and your honest perspective on breaking barriers truly highlight that the tech world is enriched by diverse voices and unconventional paths.
We’re inspired by your mission at Zero and your proof that you truly don’t need to be a tech expert to lead profound change.
If you loved this interview, check out more stories from incredible women breaking barriers in tech Women Rock
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