ACT Group

Most commodities desks trade barrels and bushels. ACT Group trades the right to pollute and the certificates that prove you did not: carbon allowances, renewable energy and biomethane certificates, biofuels, the instruments that corporate decarbonization runs on. Bram Bastiaansen and Jaap Janssen started it in 2009 from a canal-side Amsterdam office, two market-makers working markets most banks ignored.

The bet was that environmental markets would stop being a sideshow, and policy obliged. Originally ACT Commodities, it renamed to ACT Group as the work spread past pure trading into advisory and software, including engage50, a platform aimed at Scope 3 supply-chain emissions. Amsterdam remains home, with desks now spread across Europe, the Americas and Asia.