ING will be trialing a carbon footprint tracking app offered by Fintech firm Cogo with 350,000 mobile clients.
The Footprint Insight feature is being made available to clients who currently use the bank’s Insight function, which groups their income and expenditure by spending category.
Footprint Insight offers an estimate of the CO2e emissions of a client’s overall spending. This is determined using monthly expenditure per spending category like ‘groceries’, ‘fixed costs’ and ‘shopping’ and is then multiplied by a specific emission factor.
Users will also be provided tips on effectively managing their carbon impact through push notifications and will reportedly be able to see how their footprint compares with the Dutch national average.
The introduction of the pilot, which will be used to obtain vital feedback on customer use of the app, has been announced after a successful collaboration by Cogo with ING’s innovation accelerator, as one of the year’s ING Labs Brussels cohort of startups, announced in April of this year.
With the initiative from ING, and previous launches at NatWest Bank, TSB, CommBank and ANZ among others, Cogo’s management noted that it is now on track to achieve its goal of having more than 3 million clients using carbon footprint management features by the end of the year.
As covered in June 2022, clients of The Cumberland will find it a lot easier to monitor their carbon spend with a tool used to measure and reduce their carbon footprints.
The building society’s 70,000 current account customers are now being encouraged to download the Cogo app and link up their Cumberland account in order to give them an accurate picture of how their spending impacts the environment – covering financial transactions, investments, and everyday purchases.
The app will give clients suggestions on how to lower or offset their carbon footprint based on their personalized spend.
Cogo has a robust algorithm that’s able to calculate the carbon emissions of all transactions on an account.
In order to calculate an individual or household’s carbon footprint, Cogo analyzes the banking data and matches transactions to a particular industry (like fashion, grocery, insurance). It then tries to estimate the carbon footprint of that transaction using secure Open Banking data.
For instance, £1 spent at a UK-based fashion retailer creates on average 1kg CO2e.
As noted in the update, the app factors in the type of products sold by each firm, for example which energy suppliers use 100% renewable electricity.