Cogo started out as a charity called ‘Conscious Consumers’, with a mission to combat climate change by influencing consumer spending habits. Recognising the power of data to drive sustainable choices, we launched a consumer app which was powered by Open Banking. Its main aim was to empower individuals to measure and understand the carbon footprint of their spending (as everyone’s carbon footprint directly correlates with their spending).
The app had good traction, reaching 50,000 users in a matter of months, however, we soon recognised that achieving the scale necessary to create global impact required collaboration with larger institutions. This led to a strategic pivot towards partnering with banks and financial institutions.
Following a successful pilot with NatWest in 2021 to integrate carbon insight functionality into the bank’s app, we then launched our first full-scale banking partnership later that year. This was done in record time, going from pilot stage to full integration to over 8 million customers within less than five months.
Cogo is now working with 17 of the world’s leading banks – including ING in the Netherlands and OTP in Hungary – all in less than three years.
The challenges we face have less to do with developing the technology, and more related to speed and integration. Like many fintechs, we are a nimble business that can respond and adapt with pace – as proven in the way we launched our first banking partnership which we integrated within less than five months. However, many of the banks and financial institutions we work with have complex infrastructures, multiple layers of potential risk, and busy UX roadmaps, so this creates challenges. Similarly, banks, by their nature, have layers of checks and approvals, so this can slow down the speed at which we can get our products being seen and used by customers.
We have carbon insight integration live within the banking apps of multiple banking partners across multiple markets so that is what really sets us apart from our competitors. We are actively engaging millions of banking customers and we were the first carbon insight solution to be fully integrated into a mobile banking app. Our team, consisting of experts in customer data, insights, behavioural science, and sustainability, helps us stay at the forefront of developments in carbon data and behavioural change techniques, ensuring Cogo’s solutions are the most advanced and robust available.
A unique feature of Cogo is that we leverage cutting-edge behavioural science and gamification principles to deliver an engaging and impactful user experience. We go beyond measurement by assessing users' spending habits and then layer our own behavioural science framework on top. Cogo has designed a series of climate actions that range from small and easy to achieve i.e. switching to LED lightbulbs, all the way through to full retrofits of a user's home – creating hyper-personalised journeys with relevant recommendations to help customers reduce their footprint. This allows banks to deliver personalised recommendations and predictive nudges. Most competitor solutions have no climate actions or behavioural science principles embedded and therefore no opportunity to incentivise customers to reduce their footprint.
Our methodology is based on an input/output model, using market-specific data and working with leading universities, academics, and experts. We have our own in-house impact team who further improves the granularity of our data and checks for robustness. We then use these emission factors to enrich banking transaction data to build a personalised carbon footprint that is dynamic and easy to understand – this gives us an advantage over other players in the space who apply global models which give less accuracy.
At Cogo we put a lot of emphasis on maximising footprint accuracy while keeping solutions intuitive and easy to use. We use the best available data sets that are market-specific (vs. regional or global) which ensures accuracy and relevancy. We go beyond standard EEIO datasets and develop custom hybrid models for key carbon-intensive categories such as energy, food, and fashion. In addition, we have stringent granularity and data quality standards. We use over 200 carbon categories and ensure emission factor data is regularly updated and quality assured. With all of our clients, we conduct an in-depth analysis of their transaction categorisation to ensure it's as accurate as possible before enriching it with carbon data. We are also working towards improving the spend-based approach by moving to product-level and merchant-level data.
Thanks to using transaction data feeds we can deliver a complete footprint. Most personal and business carbon footprint categories are taken into account, including those that are difficult to estimate reliably using other methods. Lastly, the automation in our approach ensures that there is a lower risk of errors.
Banks have a critical role to play in helping to motivate and mobilise their customers to decarbonise, by removing financial barriers and providing incentives i.e. around home retrofitting. We know from our research that 75% of banking customers want to know about the environmental impact of their spending, and 62% support their bank in helping them reduce this impact. So, our partnerships with banks are critical.
When Cogo started out, we had good traction through our direct-to-consumer app, however, we were still only interacting with tens of thousands of customers. Fast forward to the work we are now doing partnering with banks, and we’re able to interact with and engage millions of customers. This transforms the potential impact that we can all have on the climate.
As mentioned, we know from our own research that 75% of banking customers want to know about the environmental impact of their spending, and 62% support their bank in helping them reduce this impact. This has been further proven by what we’ve seen through our banking partnerships. Quite simply, when customers start to see and understand their carbon footprint, they engage with it and want to learn more. We call this carbon literacy – so the more carbon literate someone becomes, the more engaged they become.
When our carbon management feature was introduced by one of our banking partners, customers gave it a satisfaction rating of 4.2/5 – the highest rating for any feature introduced by that bank. Similarly, another banking partner has seen a 14+ NPS uplift for customers using its carbon footprint technology, and another partner has seen average dwell times of 4-6 minutes. These positive engagement metrics are typically rare for banks due to the very swift and transactional relationships they have with customers following the digitisation of banking.
Our conversations with partners have really evolved in the past few years. What started out as conversations about helping customers to measure their carbon footprint have developed into more strategic discussions about how the data and insights we can provide not only inform customers but also help our banking partners in shaping their product roadmaps and support with increasing regulatory requirements. As regulation continues to be a pressure point, we expect to be offering far more of this strategic support.
In the next few years, we also expect other markets to recognise the need to join the climate race. While we have a fairly established presence in Europe and APAC, markets such as the US are lagging behind and have not yet truly recognised the role that banks can play in tackling the climate crisis, or the positive customer engagement and loyalty that can result.
Emma is the European CEO of Cogo, a green fintech business that specialises in creating personalised carbon footprints for individuals and small businesses. She is an experienced business leader who has spent her career helping many FTSE 100 businesses to transform their customer data and behavioural science into commercial value. After identifying her personal purpose for using data4good she shifted her career focus to use data and behavioural science to develop and scale tools to help tackle the climate crisis.
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