On the day of Trex’s launch, its two CEOs are not short of conviction. But what’s striking is not just what they believe about the future of climate intelligence, it’s what they think the industry has been getting wrong for years. 

Both came to Trex from different angles. But they arrived at the same conclusion: the tools the financial world relies on to understand climate risk are, at best, incomplete and, at worst, misleading. 

For Willemijn Verdegaal, the journey has been two decades in the making.  “When I started, climate change wasn’t even on the agenda for financial institutions,” she says. What followed was a gradual evolution: first getting climate onto that agenda, then building the early frameworks, most notably carbon footprinting, that institutions could use to respond. 

But over time, something began to feel off.  Carbon footprinting, she explains, was “a logical place to start” but it quickly revealed its limits. It could measure emissions, but it couldn’t answer the questions investors actually cared about: where value would be created, where risk would materialise, and how markets would shift as the energy transition unfolded. 

“It’s just not the right measure for identifying financial risk and opportunities,” she says plainly. 

That dissatisfaction deepened as she worked with increasingly sophisticated asset owners and managers. The industry, she realised, was relying on proxies that didn’t map to financial outcomes.  What was missing was a way to connect climate change to the real economy, to demand, to revenues, to growth. 

A market asking the wrong questions 

 For Jack Oliver, the gap revealed itself in a different way.  Back in 2018, asset owners began travelling, literally, to seek answers. 

“We had several pioneering asset owners coming to the University of Exeter looking for a different way forward,” he recalls. They were long-term investors, often “systemically invested,” grappling with a problem they couldn’t quite articulate, but knew was significant. 

There was, he says, “something majorly wrong in the way they were using intelligence to understand climate risks and opportunities.” 

Part of the issue was cultural. Climate analysis had become entangled with compliance, something to “box tick” rather than something to drive decision-making.  But that is now changing. 

“The tide has shifted,” Oliver says. “It’s no longer about being seen to do something by merely reporting. It’s about financial resilience for investment decision-making. It’s about fiduciary duty.” 

And yet, most of the tools available to investors still lag behind that shift. 

Beyond linear thinking 

At the heart of Trex’s proposition is a simple idea: the real world is messy, non-linear and shaped by tipping points. Climate intelligence should reflect that. 

Most existing models, both CEOs argue, do not. 

“They assume neat, linear pathways,” says Verdegaal, orderly transitions from 1.5 to 2 to 3 degrees of warming. But reality doesn’t behave like that.” 

Instead, change comes in jumps.  Technology adoption accelerates suddenly. Physical systems destabilise abruptly. Markets reprice risk in bursts rather than increments. 

Trex’s modelling is designed to capture exactly these dynamics: tipping points, cascading effects, and feedback loops. 

Take electric vehicles. Their rapid adoption doesn’t just affect car manufacturers; it reshapes energy grids, supply chains, government revenues, and entire sectors in unpredictable ways. “These are self-reinforcing trends,” Verdegaal explains. “Most models don’t capture that.” 

Oliver frames it more simply: “When you look out the window, you can see things happening, unfolding. That real-world lens, the ability to reflect real world dynamics, is what Trex provides.” 

The goal is not to predict the future perfectly, something both are clear is impossible, but to better represent the dynamics of how change actually unfolds. 

From carbon to cashflows 

This shift in thinking leads directly to Trex’s core proposition.  If carbon footprinting doesn’t tell you what you need to know, what does? 

The answer, according to Trex, lies in financial metrics, particularly revenue and growth.  “What people are really looking for,” says Verdegaal, “are indicators of which sectors, regions and companies stay viable across a range of energy transition pathways or after a physical hazard impact, and which won’t.” 

That means modelling how demand for goods and services changes as the energy system evolves and translating that into expected revenues and profitability. 

It also means integrating two worlds that are often treated separately: transition risk and physical risk. Trex brings both into a single framework, allowing investors to trace impacts from macroeconomic shifts down to individual companies, and across the entire investment process, from asset allocation to portfolio construction. 

The result is not just another dataset, but a consistent decision-making system. 

Why the industry hasn't caught up

If the need for this approach is becoming clearer, why hasn’t the market already moved?  Part of the answer is inertia.  “If you’ve been selling a solution for years,” Oliver says, “it’s very difficult to go back and say: we were wrong.” 

Linear models, despite their limitations, have been commercially successful. Admitting their flaws would mean challenging not just products, but entire business models.  There are also deeper issues: gaps in scientific understanding, differing views on responsibility, and a lingering perception that climate analysis is more political than financial. 

But that, too, is changing.  A growing group of “early adopters,” as Oliver calls them, are reframing the problem entirely, not as a question of sustainability, but of financial materiality. 

Trust, transparency - and uncertainty 

For all their ambition, both CEOs are careful not to overstate what Trex can do. 

“No model is perfect,” Verdegaal says. “The science is uncertain.”  What matters, she argues, is not eliminating uncertainty, but confronting it openly and rigorously. 

Trex’s approach is built on what she describes as “the best available tools and insights,” combined with a willingness to explore difficult, uncertain scenarios, particularly around tipping points. “It's important to look issues in the eye and start to take first steps into calculating what those kinds of scenarios would actually mean for the financial industry”. 

Crucially, that comes with a commitment to transparency.  Methodologies are made fully available to clients, and assumptions are clearly articulated and open to challenge. 

“It’s about being honest about what we know, and what we don’t,” she says. 

Oliver echoes that balance. 

“No model is 100% accurate” he says, “but credibility comes from grounding analysis in the best available science, both on the physical and the transition side, and constantly weighing complexity against decision usefulness.” 

They both feel the business sets high standards for itself.  Oliver continues, “Our internal bar is so high. We are at every juncture looking to make decisions that support the defensibility of our methodology so we can push out analysis that is as credible as it can possibly be.” 

A different starting point 

In many ways, Trex is not just launching a product, it is reframing a category. 

Climate intelligence, the founders argue, should not be about backward-looking metrics or simplified scenarios. It should be about understanding how the real world is changing and what that means for capital. 

That means embracing complexity, not smoothing it away.  It means linking climate dynamics directly to financial outcomes.  And above all, it means asking a different question. 

Not: how green is this portfolio?  But: how will it perform in a world that is changing faster, and less predictably, than most models assume.  It looks like Trex may have the product that provides the answer.