Reading Between the Balance Sheet
Why would I choose to spend my evenings and weekends buried in CFA textbooks?
In climate finance, sustainability, consulting, and entrepreneurship, technical knowledge is only half the job. The other half is understanding what people care about, what keeps them under pressure, and how they define value.
To build that understanding, I considered an MBA, a Master's in Finance, or the CFA, and for me the CFA was the best path. It felt more practical, focused more on portfolio management, and most importantly was the cheapest, both in time and in money.
The CFA journey then became less about passing exams and more about building a new kind of empathy. Not soft empathy alone, but practical empathy. The kind that helps you read a balance sheet and understand why a client is hesitant. The kind that helps you hear a management team’s priorities and understand the pressure behind them. The kind that helps you test whether a customer will pay for an idea, not just agree that the idea sounds useful.
That is why I chose the CFA: to better understand my clients, my employer, and my customers.
Understanding my clients
As the PCAF Africa Lead, part of my role is to engage financial institutions across the continent and encourage them to join PCAF, the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials.
PCAF offers clear benefits. Members can access the emissions factor database, take part in the PCAF Academy, and receive support from a technical team. These are useful tools for institutions that want to measure and disclose financed emissions in a credible and consistent way.
But I quickly learned that the "why" behind measuring and disclosing emissions often gets lost in translation.
Many financial institutions are dealing with several priorities at the same time. They are thinking about capital, regulation, customers, credit risk, profitability, shareholder expectations, and operational capacity. Climate action sits inside that wider picture. If I only speak in sustainability terms, I may miss the real concerns that shape their decisions.
In consulting, my work revolves around solving client problems. Those problems vary. Some are operational. Some are strategic. Some are financial. Often, they are all three at once.
The CFA has helped me understand how financial institutions think about value, risk, and timing. More importantly, it has helped me ask better questions:
How does climate risk impact expected cash flows?
What implications does this have for asset value?
How does a lender evaluate credit risk in high-emissions sectors?
What makes a sustainability initiative credible to an investment committee?
This matters because climate change is not only an environmental issue for financial institutions. It can affect loan books, asset values, insurance costs, operating costs, and the long-term value of investments. If sustainability teams want to show why climate risk management matters, they need to connect climate impacts to the financial statements that decision-makers already use.
That means speaking about future cash flows. It means speaking about asset values. It means explaining how physical risk, transition risk, and financed emissions can affect an investor’s balance sheet.
Studying the CFA has given me more confidence in those conversations to understand how finance professionals frame the world, so I can make the climate finance conversation more relevant to them.
Good questions help you draw out what a client really needs, and Scripture says it better than I can:
"The purposes of person's heart are deep waters, but one who has insight draws them out - Proverbs 20:5
Understanding my employer
The second reason I chose the CFA program was to gain a deeper understanding of my employer, a private equity-owned firm.
Private equity ownership shapes what the business focuses on: growth, profitability, and efficiency, because that is how returns are generated. That focus filters down into decisions about hiring, investment, performance, and business development. A solid grasp of finance helps me understand these decisions, even when I'm not the one making them.
Studying for the CFA has given me the vocabulary behind many management discussions: revenue quality, cash conversion cycles, debt servicing, ROIC, and valuation multiples.
These aren't just textbook terms. They drive real choices in the business. Understanding them helps me support leadership, appreciate the pressures they face, and align my work with what the organisation is trying to achieve.
If I want to help grow the climate finance industry, I need to understand the business models that sustain it. Growth requires funding, and good ideas need commercial discipline to thrive.
It reminds me of the parable of the talents. A master entrusts his servants with capital, and the ones who put it to work and grow it are commended. Private equity works in a similar way: investors entrust capital to a business and expect it to be stewarded well. Seen through that lens, the focus on returns is less about pressure and more about faithfulness with what has been entrusted.
His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’ - Mathew 25:21
Understanding my customers
The third reason was more entrepreneurial.
During my free time last year, I worked on an idea to digitise the waste management industry in Africa, starting with Nigeria. The idea came from a real problem. Waste management affects health, cities, jobs, recycling, emissions, and the wider environment. In many African markets, the sector includes formal operators, informal workers, households, businesses, local governments, recyclers, aggregators, and many small daily transactions.
At first glance, digitisation sounds like the obvious answer. Better data. Easier payments. Improved collection tracking. More visibility across the value chain. Stronger links between waste generators, collectors, and processors.
And the market agrees. Almost everyone we spoke to saw the value. Our platform was almost free to use. On paper, adoption should have been easy.
It wasn't. Price was never our real competitor. Opportunity cost was.
The businesses we spoke to were paying for inefficiencies everywhere else in their business. They spent heavily on diesel because the grid couldn't give them reliable electricity. They paid high costs to move and export materials, and high maintenance costs on ageing vehicles and equipment. Many were not optimising their operations. They weren't looking to optimise; they were fighting to keep the business alive. The tool was valuable, but it was never the priority.
Europe is a useful contrast. There, more advanced environmental regulation indirectly forces a baseline of data capture. Extended producer responsibility schemes, landfill taxes, waste transfer documentation, and corporate sustainability reporting all require companies to track what they generate, move, and recover.
Digital tools slot into an obligation that already exists. In Nigeria, no such obligation created the pull, so the tool had to justify itself entirely on its own.
Finance has helped me see this more clearly. It has pushed me to think about incentives, adoption, cash cycles, and above all opportunity cost. A product can be useful, even free, and still lose to the more urgent claims on a customer's time and money.
They were in a season of survival, not optimisation, and no tool, however good, can skip a season.
"There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens." – Ecclesiastes 3:1
The more I studied finance, the more I realised that understanding customers means understanding their constraints. Not just what they value, but what they can prioritise when survival comes first.
Wrapping It Up
Understanding finance was one reason I chose to study for the CFA Program, but the deeper motivation was to understand people better. Finance explains how people make decisions under risk, how they judge value, and who they trust.
I won't pretend it's been easy. Getting through Level I took a lot of effort and more late nights than I'd like to admit. Whether or not I continue with the CFA Program, I already see it as time well spent. It has given me a way to translate climate into capital, and ideas into sustainable business models. More than that, it has reminded me to keep chasing my curiosity, however long it takes.
Which is why I keep coming back to this verse:
"The beginning of wisdom is this: Get wisdom. Though it cost all you have, get understanding." – Proverbs 4:7 (NIV)
Have you ever learned something outside your field that helped you understand your clients, colleagues, or customers better? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
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