Who said you can’t teach an old bank new tricks?

This summer, an institutional bank signed a new type of deal for a new asset class. Chestnut Carbon, a carbon market project developer that plants forests and sells the credits to corporations, collaborated with Microsoft and JPMorgan Chase to create one of the largest carbon removal offtake agreements in the United States.

Gregory Adams, Chestnut Carbon’s CFO, took CFO Brew behind the scenes of this first-of-its-kind non-recourse project financing for carbon afforestation. The company currently operates in eight states: Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and South Carolina, where it buys land to plant native, diverse, and conservation-grade forests to generate carbon credits.

Adams spent nearly five years at JPM and the rest of his career at Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and other financial institutions, working on energy and project development and commodities. After being CFO at Chestnut for less than two years, he helped orchestrate a $210 million credit facility to provide Microsoft with 7 million tons of nature-based carbon removal credits over 25 years, from forests planted in the southeastern US.

Start early. While JPMorgan came out publicly as wanting to be the “carbon bank of choice” in late June, Adams had already been in talks with JPMorgan for months. Chestnut had signed its agreement with Microsoft in January, which was when his conversations with the bank went into high gear. But Adams floated the idea to multiple banks before the Microsoft deal. In July, Chestnut and JPMorgan closed on their deal.

“It’s a new asset class,” he told CFO Brew. “So you want to be able to go in front of people sooner than later.”

But not too early. Adams warned that “if you don’t have a contract, it’s going to be a short conversation.” He suggested drumming up interest in a new type of deal. JPMorgan declined to comment for this story, but Vijnan Batchu, global head of JPMorgan’s center for carbon transition, told Bloomberg in July that “providing this kind of financing gives developers the runway they need to succeed at an attractive cost of capital, allowing them to focus on delivering significant carbon projects and fulfilling contracts.”

For more on how Adams successfully executed on this strategy, keep reading.—JK

Sure, we’d love to ask folks from the IRS how they handled the longest shutdown in US history, but we have a feeling they’re a bit busy at the moment.

Though the federal government is reopening, it’s going to take quite some time (and effort) to get things fully up and running again—particularly at the IRS, which furloughed almost half of its workers and limited its operations during the shutdown.

Instead of asking the number-crunchers who are up to their ears in backlogged paperwork, we can turn to the next best thing: the people who’ve handled it before.

At AICPA and CIMA’s National Tax Conference on November 16–18 in Washington, DC, a number of former IRS commissioners shared insights from handling IRS operations in shutdowns past. Their main takeaway is no shocker: It ain’t easy.

Keep reading.—NP

The feeling of getting a 5/5 on the Brew’s weekly news quiz has been compared to getting a company-wide shout-out from your boss. It’s that satisfying.