Finance Monthly FinTech Awards 2022. ESG & F i nTechs 53 carbon capture projects instead of environmentally harmful ones. Users can automatically neutralize their carbon footprint and achieve a Carbon Zero lifestyle. Incumbent credit card provider Visa recently announced a similar card program called FutureCard which offers 5% cashback on green spending to reward consumers who demonstrate ESG-supportive purchase behaviour. Payments Climate FinTechs in the payments segment focus on influencing the spending and shopping behaviour of consumers to help influence them towards embracing brands, companies, and practices that both are more sustainable and help reduce their consumer carbon footprints. And while all these offerings advance ESG objectives, they also help Climate FinTechs attract a key demographic segment and sustain their transaction revenue by aligning financial transactions with ESG goals. Ecountabl is a US-based, purposedriven tech company that helps consumers shop and spend on brands and companies that align with their social and environmental goals. Ecountabl seeks to make consumers more aware of their spending tendencies. Users can connect their credit card or bank account to Ecountabl so that it can monitor the ESG impact of their purchases. Ecountabl achieves this by maintaining one of the largest databases in the world monitoring the level of ESG adoption for brands and employers. The company is venture-backed with funding from CRCM Ventures. Meniga, a UK-based company, focuses on addressing the issue of carbon emissions produced by consumer spending patterns. It offers a carbon insight platform that banks can use to inform their customers about their carbon footprint based on their spending. The platform also helps offset this emission by inviting customers to take challenges, adopting green products, participating in the bank’s CSR initiatives, or finding other ways to offset their carbon footprint. Meniga drives insights from the Meniga Carbon Index to provide accurate estimations using transaction data. Alipay, the mobile payment app by Ant Group of China, launched an initiative called Ant Forest which encourages users to make decisions that lower their carbon footprint through the spending behaviour using the Alipay app. The resulting reduction in carbon emissions are recorded, and users are rewarded with “green energy” points which can be used to plant actual trees that users can monitors using satellite imagery. Ant Forest has helped over 600 million users plant more than 326 million trees since it launched in 2016. All three of the examples above focus on influencing the customer to make better energy consumption choices, rather than help them offset their emission by investing in environmentally friendly projects. By putting the customer in charge of their emission behaviour, these companies help consumers focus on their own contributions to advancing ESG goals. It appears that these firms are intent on changing behaviour and are leaving the carbon trading investment opportunity for more institutional investors who are likely to be more effective participants in that market. Investing Asset Management and Wealth Management are key focus areas for ESG-focused FinTechs. These companies help individual investors generate a more ESGcompliant portfolio by either offering a specialised marketplace to access ESG-friendly investments or by managing consumers’ portfolios with a focus on composing an aggregate portfolio that achieves measurable ESG goals. Raise Green is one of the first green crowd investing portals in the US that offers investors a marketplace for local impact investing. The portal helps investors get fractional ownership in clean energy and climate solution projects. The firm is focused on appealing to the younger demographic segment which favours impact investing. The firm completed an angel round of equity financing in April 2021. There are numerous FinTech portfolio management providers like Arnie Impact and Carbon Collective that offer personalised or pre-built portfolios which focus on sustainable investments and are aligned to the personal values and financial goals of the ESGfocused individual investor. Arnie recently completed its early-stage venture round in September 2021 while Carbon Collective completed one in January 2021. Both
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