In this episode of the Connector Podcast recorded at the Nordic FinTech Festival, host Koen Vanderhoydonk interviews Theodore, founder of AgroRisk, a climate‑risk platform for agriculture. Theodore explains his background in sustainable finance, climate regulation, and UN diplomacy, and describes how AgroRisk combines high‑resolution satellite imagery, harvester‑derived IoT data, and other datasets to model field‑level flood and yield risk. He discusses the growing regulatory pressure on banks and insurers (SFDR, CSRD) to assess climate risk in agricultural lending, and how his solution can help SMEs meet reporting requirements. The conversation covers practical challenges of integrating farm machinery sensors, the need for interoperable data lakes, and the potential for fintech products to improve credit, insurance, and commodity‑futures decisions. Theodore shares the startup’s current stage—a demo launched at the festival—and his focus on building partnerships with banks, insurers, and data providers. The interview ends with contact information (agrarisk.io, LinkedIn) and an invitation for collaboration.
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Welcome to the Connector Podcast, an ongoing conversation connecting fintechs, banks, and regulators worldwide. Join CEO and founder Koen Vanderhoydonk as you learn more about the latest available trends and solutions in the markets.
Here we are again, live from Copenhagen Fintech Festival, Nordic Fintech Festival, and I'm now with Theodore. Theodore is actually starting his new company called AgroRisk. Can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and also about the company?
Absolutely. Great to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
You're welcome.
So, so I have a long history and background from sustainable finance, climate, and the intersection between sustainability and the financial sector. Really trying to be in the solution space, want to accelerate that green transition and manage those risks that are happening as climate change unfolds, unfortunately. So what I'm building now is a climate risk platform focusing specifically on agriculture. So agriculture is really being affected by more extreme weather, by climate change in terms of, you know, a lot of fields are getting flooded when it rains a lot, unfortunately.
Unfortunately.
So we need to adapt our farming practices. We need to really start taking this into account. And climate change is really turning into a financial risk, both for farmers, but also for the banks and insurance companies that are engaged with them. So this is what we're trying to solve.
And how are you solving this?
So we're integrating a— sorry, we're integrating a mountain of data, basically. So we're looking quite detailed at what happens at the individual field level, because some fields will be flooded and some won't. And if you have a field that is being flooded during the spring, for example, for a prolonged period of time, that will affect your crop yield. So we are basically looking at using a lot of satellite data imagery and combining that with multiple other datasets to understand which fields gets flooded when, under which circumstances, and what are the effects of that.
Would I also have to think about a lot of IoTs on the spots or the field itself? Like measurements taken at source?
That could be really interesting to do as well. The satellite imagery we have available is really pretty detailed. So we can say a lot already just from using remote sensing and other types of datasets. But getting IoT devices out there on the field to do real-time measurements and really understand what's going on, that could be even more interesting. Because what you really want to do is test your model against real-world ground truth data and really understand what is going out there. So in fact, we are already integrating a lot of data from harvesters. So when a harvester harvests a field, that is essentially a giant IoT. It produces a lot of data down to what happens at each individual, like 5 meters that it's driving on. And we use that to feed into our model to fine-tune it. But you could have other such IoT solutions as well.
Now, what I find particularly interesting is that you obviously do this to save our planet. But if we take that more in— we're at a fintech event here. So there's a lot of financial sort of talks. And ESG is also important within the finance industry. Think about SFDR. There's a lot of reporting. There's CSRD, which are for the companies to report. How do you see that? Do you expect that there will be sort of regulations that will sort of come to agriculture as well, like we have on some other parts of our sector?
Yeah. So, so I think some of these regulations that you mentioned coming out of the EU around sustainability and climate, integrating climate risk in the financial sector and really understanding sustainability issues deep down in the financial products that are offered by the sector, that really affects anyone engaging with the sector, even if it's a small farmer. So all the SMEs are really going to be affected because The financial companies, the banks that are lending out money to farmers, they're required to take into account and understand their climate risk and they have to report on it. How can they do that? They can use a solution like ours, but they also need a lot of information from farmers in terms of lots of detailed data points and questionnaires. And that goes across all kinds of SME sectors, basically. So a lot of these rules are basically being pushed down to SMEs. So I think a really important piece of that parcel is to help SMEs live up to these regulatory requirements, not because they are under the rules themselves, but just because they're engaging with a bank, with an insurance company that are under these quite strict rules.
Mm-hmm. No, and what I'm also thinking is that while we talk about agriculture, then we talk about farmers that are literally on the field doing their stuff. There's obviously a lot of machinery nowadays. But is that not a little bit far away from their bat show? The fact that you come with artificial intelligence learning models and stuff like that, how does that work in practice?
Yeah, that's a good question. So I grew up in the countryside myself, and I should say it.
So did I.
It's a very practical and concrete activity. And it's really fascinating to speak with a lot of farmers and to really understand this space. Because you're leapfrogging basically from something that is on the one hand very concrete and practical and weather dependent, and on the other hand, very technology intensive.
Mm-hmm.
So you're already seeing it with a lot of the farm machinery that is pretty advanced and very digitized. And I see a lot of farmers, especially the younger ones, the bigger farms, they're ready to adopt new technologies. And they are using a lot out there already, but it's a big shift in mentality and the way of working.
I'm just trying to project like things that are topics within the bank industry. One of the big topics is interoperability. And now you say that machinery already have like sensors and stuff. And I'm always fascinated when you go on TV and they show this like things that are happening. So, but would not the ideal world be that that data is already combined and that you have a collective system that all is put together like a data lake for agriculture?
That would be amazing. I would love that. I think it really helps having more data and understanding what happens under different weather scenarios and different conditions is really helpful for the farmer to adapt their farming practices, not just from recollection of this is how it used to be, but really understanding the statistics and the analysis. But also for the banks financing them, there's a lot of reluctancy to engage with the agricultural sector. They got the worst deals among any kind of SMEs because there are some risks and we are seeing, you know, decreased yields across Europe, for example. I think more data and analysis, understanding really what are the impacts, can help solve that problem because we do need financing if we want to transform our agricultural sector towards becoming more sustainable. That means we will likely be growing other things on our fields. We'll likely have less of a meat-intensive production. But it also means putting down drainage systems and really adapting to warmer and wetter climates. And that requires financing. So if we want to future-proof our agricultural sector, we do need the financial sector to really come on board as well.
It almost also sounds like beyond banking. I could almost imagine there are obviously in Europe several agriculture-driven banks like Crédit Agricole, just to give an example. It's already in the name. You would, you could also think that they give that sort of service to their client in order for them to make a better credit facility.
Exactly. So this is essentially a fintech product. I'm from the financial sector. So this is, this is what we know best. And we see it very much as part of the customer dialogue and the value add that the bank delivers to their customers. And these are long-term relationships because they lend out lots of money over long periods of time. And I think it can be really helpful for that customer dialogue to say, well, you know, these are the types of risks you might be looking into. If you want to mitigate those risks, look, here's where you could put down drainage and we can help you finance that. Or this is where you, you know, might want to grow your highest value yield, highest value crop. And this is where you might want to install solar panels and help them through this period. I think that's really helpful for the bank and the farmer.
I have a very strange question because are you not manipulating the future market? Because you can actually manipulate a future outcome of crops, which you try to hedge via the future market. True.
I mean, if you get really good at this—
Sounds like arbitrage. No, it's not a bad thing.
The global food market is pretty complex, both on the supply and the demand side. So if we get to the point where my solution really influences prices or supply—
You'd be in a good place.
I'm in a good place. I'm a very happy man. Until that, we have more mundane wishes. But sure, commodity futures, that's an important field as well.
Yeah, yeah. And I have a nice story to share because I once worked with a bank that was doing a lot of these futures for clients. And at one point in time, there was like a big lorry in front of the door of the bank, and it was a physical delivery of potatoes. It was super funny. A little bit unexpected. It can happen.
They didn't expect to actually get those potatoes.
But at the end of the day, that's what it is about. No, you also said that you're in a journey. Where are you in your journey, if I may ask?
Yeah, absolutely. So essentially, I was a bureaucrat before. I was working for the financial supervisor, heading up sustainability work there.
Oh, nice.
Then I was in banking, working in sustainability and compliance in a big regional bank. Before that, I was actually a UN diplomat. So I've been working in big organizations with the common theme of sustainability, climate, and with a financial element to it. So now I'm an entrepreneur. I quit my corporate job and all the safety. Welcome to the club. Thanks so much. About a year ago, a little bit more than a year ago. So that's definitely a learning experience and a huge journey. I'm really proud with what we've achieved. We just launched our demo of our climate risk platform just yesterday here at Nordic FinTech Week and working with so many great partners and a lot of people to make this come true and hopefully bring it to the market. So, so it's, it's a great journey. It's also tough and it's hard. And, and, you know, you have the upsides, but you also have the downsides.
Of course, of course. I think this is a good, good ending point for our podcast. Time flies when you're having fun. But it's almost like, how can people help you and where do they find you?
So I'm really looking for, for partnerships. I think the way to do this is really working with partners, both on the financial side, obviously banks, insurance companies. We're definitely open for business.
Of course.
But also solutions and data providers that we're looking to partner up with. We don't want to do everything ourselves. We believe in strong partnerships to deliver good results together. And you can find us here at Nordic FinTech Week, on agrarisk.io, on LinkedIn, anywhere. We're happy to always have a conversation.
Brilliant, Theodore. Many, many thanks for being here in the podcast. Thank you also to the audience, and stay tuned. More fintech news. Thank you.
Thanks. Bye.
Bye bye.
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