Hewson Baltzell is President, COO and initial investor in Helios Exchange, a SaaS business focused on energy efficiency in commercial buildings that has significant potential for reducing carbon emissions. Helios is the world’s first commercial real estate platform for energy retrofit project development, insurance, and financing, with analysis of 315,000 commercial properties in North America and Europe.

He is also on the planning team at OS-Climate, an initiative under the Linux Foundation to create an open-source data and application development community to bring more and better climate data and analytics to institutional investors, regulators, and the public at large.

Having co-founded what is now MSCI ESG Research, Hewson spent 17 years building the dominant firm in the environmental, social and governance research field, from a 2-person start-up in 1998 (Innovest). He and his team conceived and built the rating models, carbon estimation models and many of MSCI’s current products. The ESG unit now has 300 employees, over 1,000 clients, research on over 9,000 equities, 250,000 bonds, and 35,000 mutual funds and ETFs, covering over 1.6 million securities, and revenue of $100 million.

Hewson was on the Board and Audit Committee of the Global Impact Investing Network for 7 years through December 2018 and has been on the Standards Advisory Council (the rating committee) of B-Lab for over 9 years.

Hewson recently spent a year as CEO of the Sorenson Impact Center at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business. Founded and endowed by Jim Sorenson, an entrepreneur and early impact investor, the Center has 30 full time staff and 60 interns and focuses on managing an early-stage impact investing fund, on helping to solve social issues through data analytics and innovative financing structures, and on education through intern programs, impact-related courses, executive education, and the annual Winter Innovation Summit.

Prior to Innovest, Hewson spent 12 years in real estate finance at JPMorgan, Lehman Brothers and private investment companies. He has an MBA in Finance from Wharton and a BA in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania.