Drinkotec: Changing a company, changing a life (B): Taking the leap

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In August 2023, Alpian's founding CEO Schuyler Weiss announced his departure, promoting Gianmarco Bonaita to the role. Alpian had pioneered digital Swiss private banking. With three rounds of financing, a full-fledged Swiss banking license from FINMA and a strategic partnership with Fideuram–Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, it also demonstrated a solid B2B potential selling its digital technology. Reinventing the private banking industry for digital natives was no simple feat. Among the most pressing concerns were how to reduce the client acquisition costs, how to diversify private banking services, how broadly to expand Alpian retail services while keeping the costs down and how to develop the fledgling B2B market. Scale was clearly of the essence, and so far it had come at a very high cost. What else could they do to increase brand awareness and client acquisition to accelerate scale up without proportional cost increases? And as if that was not enough, Alpian also had to deal with the agenda of a new majority owner.

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What does a zero target measure? In 2016, Barry Callebaut launched Forever Chocolate with a pledge to eradicate child labor from its supply chain by 2025. For its 2021-22 financial year, the company reported over 25,000 cases of child labor identified and 2,844 remediated. In May 2023, it changed the target: By 2025, human rights due diligence would cover its entire cocoa supply chain and every identified case would be remediated. A Bittersweet Paradox: From Zero Child Labor to Human Rights Due Diligence uses this decision to examine how zero KPIs and impact metrics behave in practice. A zero KPI states an absolute ethical demand in a single number. That simplicity mobilizes action. It can also conceal the conditions that determine whether change lasts: persistent poverty in farming communities, limited access to education, and constraints that no single company can resolve alone. But Zero KPIs also set a measurement trap. Stronger monitoring uncovers more cases so improved visibility looks like deteriorating performance. A report of zero cases can say more about what an organization fails to see than about the children it has protected. The replacement metrics raise their own questions. Is abandoning zero child labor a retreat or an evolution in the sustainability strategy compliant with the new regulatory environment? Students work with the company's reported figures through the eyes of a sustainability manager, an investor, a child rights organization and a farmer cooperative, each reading the same evidence differently. The questions apply more broadly: to net zero emissions, zero workplace harm and zero discrimination. What exactly does 'zero' cover? Do incentives reward discovering problems? Who verifies that remediation lasts? Do indicators reveal progress or reward an attractive appearance of success?

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