As an open banking aggregator, we re-bundle our user's transaction data and give people back their monthly carbon footprint or lifestyle emissions. We then provide brand recommendations to help them lower it.
As a marketplace, we incentivize people with green cashback and green loan deals to help bridge the gap towards price parity between 'incumbent non-green, typically lower priced' products & services and 'low emission, typically premium priced' products & services.
Our filter is an external third party that validates whether a product is sustainable or is just greenwashing.
Bridging the gap in income inequalities plays an important part in tackling climate because if you can't afford to care, why would you? But when 55% of the cumulative emission reductions required to stay on track for 2050 come from consumer choices, it's an opportunity the world can't afford to miss.
You are right, as an intermediary, anyone could copy our BaaS plumbing and then build a recommender system and provide a curated 'playlist' of what they should buy to lower their lifestyle emissions.
So it begs the question, how (else) should we re-bundle our product to create value?
As I start to think about defensibility, I keep coming back to the idea of the credit score. We are all used to getting our credit score and paying 3 USD to Experian or Dunn & Bradstreet. Credit scoring is essentially a measure of abundance, as in, what loan, mortgage, or overdraft can I get access to? What we are trying to re-bundle is a measure of 'ecological abundance' or simply put, how much time have we got left before runaway climate change makes life as we know it irretrievable. Sadly, if people only find value in their carbon footprint when water starts coming under their door, it will be too late.
It comes down to a matter of intrinsic value versus extrinsic value and whether people have the empathy required to value something that is not immediately of benefit to them in the short term. After all, no one wakes up in the morning and says "I know, I'm going to buy something sustainable today."
So would people be willing to pay 3 USD a month for their carbon footprint? Newly published robust research suggests that people are willing to pay 1% of their income for the climate issue to just go away. So in that sense, what's a few bucks per month?
In Platform Scale you unpack the various platform interactions such as value units, filters, and currency. And money - whether fiat currency or otherwise - will always be how we exchange value. And since our carbon footprints don't have any everyday value, as such, because it's not a metric we need to get through the month (i.e. it doesn't pay the bills, rent, or mortgage) it means that it will never be a currency.
It is not a filter either because access to consumerism is unlimited and our carbon footprint is not capped or regulated from the top down. That is, of course, the problem because within a few clicks, we can order whatever we want and fly wherever we want. So, as you can probably gather, we are trying to apply platform thinking to create ground-up value and awareness.
I would love to get your and the community's thoughts on where the carbon footprint (credit score) sits on the platform canvas. Climate fintech is important as it allows us to redo the plumbing of our economy. I haven't read much of your new material on Web 3, but road testing on the Web 2.0 API economy and then bridging the finished product to Web 3.0 sounds like it could be viable.
Arguably, our monthly carbon footprint (credit score) is the underlying yardstick by which we should measure the economic value and economic progress more generally; as let's face it, growth - as we know it - can't go on forever.
Either way, our economy is overdue an upgrade so we might as well call it capitalism 2.0 as that's the wave upon which we must ride out change. It's probably too late in the day for system change on a grand scale so let's stick with what we've got.
For consumers, sustainability is increasingly the final tick-in-the-box for how we decide whether to buy something (or not) but it's not the primary driver and never will be.
Anyway, please take a look at what we've built on climatesavers.io (not optimised for mobile yet)
Hi Sangeet,
As an open banking aggregator, we re-bundle our user's transaction data and give people back their monthly carbon footprint or lifestyle emissions. We then provide brand recommendations to help them lower it.
As a marketplace, we incentivize people with green cashback and green loan deals to help bridge the gap towards price parity between 'incumbent non-green, typically lower priced' products & services and 'low emission, typically premium priced' products & services.
Our filter is an external third party that validates whether a product is sustainable or is just greenwashing.
Bridging the gap in income inequalities plays an important part in tackling climate because if you can't afford to care, why would you? But when 55% of the cumulative emission reductions required to stay on track for 2050 come from consumer choices, it's an opportunity the world can't afford to miss.
You are right, as an intermediary, anyone could copy our BaaS plumbing and then build a recommender system and provide a curated 'playlist' of what they should buy to lower their lifestyle emissions.
So it begs the question, how (else) should we re-bundle our product to create value?
As I start to think about defensibility, I keep coming back to the idea of the credit score. We are all used to getting our credit score and paying 3 USD to Experian or Dunn & Bradstreet. Credit scoring is essentially a measure of abundance, as in, what loan, mortgage, or overdraft can I get access to? What we are trying to re-bundle is a measure of 'ecological abundance' or simply put, how much time have we got left before runaway climate change makes life as we know it irretrievable. Sadly, if people only find value in their carbon footprint when water starts coming under their door, it will be too late.
It comes down to a matter of intrinsic value versus extrinsic value and whether people have the empathy required to value something that is not immediately of benefit to them in the short term. After all, no one wakes up in the morning and says "I know, I'm going to buy something sustainable today."
So would people be willing to pay 3 USD a month for their carbon footprint? Newly published robust research suggests that people are willing to pay 1% of their income for the climate issue to just go away. So in that sense, what's a few bucks per month?
In Platform Scale you unpack the various platform interactions such as value units, filters, and currency. And money - whether fiat currency or otherwise - will always be how we exchange value. And since our carbon footprints don't have any everyday value, as such, because it's not a metric we need to get through the month (i.e. it doesn't pay the bills, rent, or mortgage) it means that it will never be a currency.
It is not a filter either because access to consumerism is unlimited and our carbon footprint is not capped or regulated from the top down. That is, of course, the problem because within a few clicks, we can order whatever we want and fly wherever we want. So, as you can probably gather, we are trying to apply platform thinking to create ground-up value and awareness.
I would love to get your and the community's thoughts on where the carbon footprint (credit score) sits on the platform canvas. Climate fintech is important as it allows us to redo the plumbing of our economy. I haven't read much of your new material on Web 3, but road testing on the Web 2.0 API economy and then bridging the finished product to Web 3.0 sounds like it could be viable.
Arguably, our monthly carbon footprint (credit score) is the underlying yardstick by which we should measure the economic value and economic progress more generally; as let's face it, growth - as we know it - can't go on forever.
Either way, our economy is overdue an upgrade so we might as well call it capitalism 2.0 as that's the wave upon which we must ride out change. It's probably too late in the day for system change on a grand scale so let's stick with what we've got.
For consumers, sustainability is increasingly the final tick-in-the-box for how we decide whether to buy something (or not) but it's not the primary driver and never will be.
Anyway, please take a look at what we've built on climatesavers.io (not optimised for mobile yet)
https://vimeo.com/917544024
Your feedback and ideas would be appreciated. Do let me know if you ever come back to Amsterdam as it would be great to meet you again.
Rory