Most "ESG" conversations fail because they begin with labels, not lives. Etcho co-founders Charlie French and Liall Medina explain how advisers can uncover what clients genuinely care about and then evidence, implement, and report on values alignment without turning advice into a tick-box exercise. Should "suitability" explicitly include values, not just risk and return?
Sustainable investing has had a turbulent few years. ESG went from buzzword to backlash—yet the underlying client need hasn't disappeared: people still want their money to reflect what they value. The problem is practical. The language can feel loaded, the process can feel compliance-led, and many "one-size-fits-all" sustainable portfolios don't match the messy reality of human priorities.
In this episode of The GoodStock Tapes, we're joined by Charlie French and Liall Medina, childhood friends, brothers-in-law, and co-founders of Etcho, a UK platform built to help advisers make values-led investing usable in real advice conversations. Their core argument is quietly provocative: suitability shouldn't stop at attitude to risk and capacity for loss. If a client cares deeply about certain issues, ignoring values alignment may be a blind spot in the advice process.
We unpack Etcho's human-first approach to profiling—designed to feel more like a conversation than a questionnaire and how it can sit alongside existing risk profiling and centralised investment propositions. We also explore the importance of portfolio transparency: looking through funds to underlying holdings, showing clients what "closer to my values" could have meant historically, and explaining any trade-offs with clarity rather than defensiveness.
A recurring theme is storytelling, not as marketing, but as client understanding. Metrics matter, but most clients engage through tangible narratives: what they own, what it supports, and why it fits their priorities.
Finally, Charlie and Lyle share Etcho's direction of travel: scalable personalised portfolios, and a longer-term ambition to broaden access to more tangible impact opportunities, without creating more platforms, more complexity, or more paperwork for advisers.
If you want sustainable finance to feel less like jargon and more like good advice, this conversation will give you fresh language, sharper questions, and practical ideas.
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About Charlie and Liall
Charlie French and Liall Medina are the co-founders of Etcho, a UK platform helping financial advisers bring values-led investing into everyday financial planning, without drowning clients in acronyms or turning sustainability into a compliance-only exercise. Childhood friends and now brothers-in-law, they built Etcho to solve a persistent gap: most people care about issues they see in the news and in their communities, yet investment conversations often fail to capture those priorities in a usable, auditable way.
Etcho combines a short, client-friendly values profiling experience with portfolio look-through analysis helping firms understand how well model portfolios and propositions align with what clients actually care about. With backgrounds spanning sustainability (including experience at a UN agency) and ESG data, Charlie and Lyle are focused on making "values suitability" practical: clearer conversations, better evidence, and reporting that prioritises client understanding through transparency and storytelling.
