In a move to work towards a more sustainable financial and environmental future, ING Nederland, the financial service provider headquartered in Amsterdam, is partnering with Cogo, a carbon footprint management firm. Together, the two organisations are enabling customers of the bank to see the environmental impact of their spending.
Step by step, all private customers can see the CO2 emissions of their expenses in the ING Mobile Banking App, thanks to Footprint Insight functionality from Cogo.
Through Cogo’s functionality, customers can see the impact of their spending on the climate and receive tips to reduce their emissions. ING and Cogo also offer comparisons between customers and the average CO2 emissions of the Dutch.
ING originally launched the functionality in July 2022 as a trial, in which 500,000 customers tested the feature. Eventually proving successful, ING is now rolling it out to all customers – showing the customer’s spend and related footprint information together within its app.
Léon Wijnands, head of sustainability at ING Nederland
Léon Wijnands, head of sustainability at ING Nederland, discussed the feature: “We have tested Footprint Insight extensively and listened to customer responses. That provides good insights.
“The roll-out to all our private customers is an important next step in the fight against climate change together with our customers. But if you want customers to go along with this, then of course you have to do it yourself first.
“We therefore work hard to make our business more sustainable. We make our offices more sustainable to reduce CO2 emissions and encourage our colleagues to travel sustainably. Our social and environmental risk policy also applies globally to all our products and services including our loan portfolio. So we are ambitious, but we are not there yet and we are well aware of that.”
Helping customers address their individual climate impact
In an ING survey focused on customer opinions of climate functionality, almost half of the users were able to indicate which purchases have a major impact on the climate. Over half also said they would like to reduce their footprint and be informed about it.
Following this feedback, ING decided to make this functionality available to all private customers; enabling customers to decide for themselves whether they want to activate and use it.
Emma Kisby, CEO, Cogo EMEA
Emma Kisby, CEO of Cogo, EMEA, also said: “We know from our own research that customers want to lower their carbon footprint, but often feel powerless as to where to start as the climate crisis feels very large. Everyone’s carbon footprint directly correlates with their spending, so banks are in a leading position to be able to help customers not only understand, but lower their carbon impact.
“That is why partnerships, such as this one with ING, are so important. We launched our first banking partnership within the UK just over two years ago, and we are now working with 20 banks globally. It is fantastic to see ING join us in helping their customers address their individual climate impact.”
The Insight Footprint functionality is an extension that represents an estimate of the CO2 emissions from purchases, based on the monthly expenditure per spending category such as ‘fixed charges’ and ‘shopping’ and is then multiplied by an emission factor.
For example, if a customer spends 40 euros on groceries, this is multiplied by Cogo’s Dutch emission factor for groceries, which will get a total of about 26kg CO2e.
The functionality does not distinguish which store people purchase their goods from. The tips given are general and relate to, for example, the fight against food waste.
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