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If you live in or near the United States, everything in the month of November is Thanksgiving themed. But even if you don’t celebrate U.S. Turkey Day, there’s still a lot to be thankful for as the year 2021 slowly winds down. To help celebrate, we’ve been looking at financial services organizations and fintechs that work to help populations that remain underserved by more traditional institutions, as well as innovative organizations that aim to encourage sustainability and help further the goals of environmental activism. As digital transformation continues to evolve rapidly, financial services organizations have a unique opportunity to shift from a product focus to a more audience-centric one.¹ And what do customers want these days? They want to engage with companies that truly match their values – not just as lip-service, but those that really walk-the-walk.

The United Nations has released 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) as a way for institutions of all types to ensure they are making both short and long-term investments in products and services that further sustainable projects. These goals include everything from Clean Water and Clean Energy to Responsible Consumption and Climate Action.² And consumers are readily looking at the products and services they consume to see how they stack up.

Check out these ten organizations focused on offering sustainable financial services/products:

• Ekko: Based in the UK, this climate-friendly debit card, app and finance platform helps consumers fight climate change, just from using their services. For every five transactions using their debit card, Ekko pays for an ocean-bound plastic bottle to be collected, and at every 50 transactions they pay for a tree to be planted. The app allows you to track the impact your purchases have had on the environment and they’ve even created an entire marketplace of sustainable products and services to further the cause.

• MasterCard’s Priceless Planet Coalition: As part of MasterCard’s extensive variety of offerings, the Priceless Planet Coalition aims to restore 100 million trees by 2025, focusing on regions that represent the greatest global need of forest regrowth. The program is dedicated to creating visibility around the carbon footprint of producing/consuming certain products and collaborates with both local communities and stakeholders.

• Stripe Climate: A service launched by Irish-American payment-provider Stripe, Stripe Climate allows businesses to direct a portion of revenue to help scale and grow emerging carbon removal technologies. Available globally, 100% of contributions from participating businesses is directed to carbon removal, with on-hand scientific advisors to help maximize long-term impact.

• Trine: Swedish company Trine is on a mission to make it easier for people to invest in solar energy in growing markets, enabling participants to earn a profit while making both a social and environmental impact. Once you set up an account, you can choose which solar partner to invest in – if that solar partner/borrower succeeds, you’ll get back your investment with interest, all while helping to further green energy sources.

• Aspiration: A U.S.-based challenger bank, Aspiration vows to help customers “spend, save and invest with a conscience.” With a promise to never use deposit money or revenue to fund oil or coal projects, the company also plants trees on behalf of consumers by allowing them to round up to the nearest dollar on debit card purchases. They also offer a Planet Protection program, which helps to offset the climate impact from every gallon of gas you purchase for your vehicle.

• Treelion: This sustainable fintech company has developed a blockchain-based solution enabling a decentralized network that launches and manages green digital projects. Based in Singapore, the company is dedicated to the green economy and helping to ensure the creation and success of large-scale green digital ecosystems. With a mission to “create an inclusive green financial ecosystem to improve the global environment,” the Treelion Foundation aims to create a global sustainable ecological business model.

• Green Fintech Network: Established in 2020 by the Swiss government, the Green Fintech Network is an action plan containing 16 concrete proposals for digital technology and sustainable finance – including proposals around a platform for sustainability data, the creation of an innovation challenge for green fintech startups, the broad promotion of open finance, and the expansion of funding for green fintechs. Hoping to make Switzerland a global leader in sustainable financial services, the action plan aims to provide incentives for the business community to drive innovative, green solutions.

• Joro: Powered by smart spending analytics, this fintech provides insights on how purchases contribute towards carbon emissions, enabling consumers to make more informed shopping decisions. This U.S. company allows consumers to “track, reduce and offset” carbon emissions of purchases, and compensate for those unavoidable purchases that result in carbon emissions by supporting a broad portfolio of carbon projects.

• Ecolytiq: Offering ‘Sustainability-as-a-Service,’ this German fintech provides banks and financial institutions with the digital infrastructure necessary for them to offer consumers ‘green finance,’ including everything from personalized impact offsetting to ESG investments. Ecolytiq offers a comprehensive sustainable banking solution that uses the Open Payment Standard released by the EU, utilizing the latest scientific research and machine learning technology to analyze individual banking transactions and offer personalized environmental footprints.

• Novus: This UK fintech, in partnership with Visa and Railsbank, provides a mobile banking app that rewards users for sustainable purchases. Consumers earn ‘impact coins’ for purchases made on the card and can then use those coins to help support various green initiatives, including ocean conservation and reforestation. Novus also allows you to track your carbon footprint, enabling you to understand which purchases are the most sustainable and providing ways to offset carbon-emitting consumption by contributing to environmental projects available directly in their app.

As the world continues to sharpen its focus on climate change, carbon emissions, reforestation and other facets of environmental activism, the business opportunity for fintechs who can respond to this need continues to expand. Younger consumers in particular have helped stimulate the growth of green finance and sustainable investment – but it’s not just millennials interested in these options anymore.³

Increasingly, consumers are not tied to traditional financial institutions and will shop around for organizations that help further causes they believe in. As Alex Johnson, Director of Fintech Research at Cornerstone Advisors said, “Consumers… want sustainability built into the products they use on a daily basis. Checking accounts, for example. Are you building a deposit, investment or lending product? You better have a plan for how usage of your product positively impacts the environment.”⁴

For more inspiration on fintechs/finservs doing good in the world, check out the other blogs in our Giving Thanks series: Fintechs/Finservs Helping Women Be More Financially Secure and Fintechs/Finservs Aimed at Solving the Unique Needs of Minorities.

And for more information on how an all-in-one risk decisioning ecosystem can make innovating in fintech even easier, check out our AI-Powered Risk Decisioning Platform page.

Resources:

1. https://bbgventures.medium.com/not-another-neobank-why-the-market-is-overcrowded-and-where-bbgv-sees-opportunity-835ebd231154
2. https://sdgs.un.org/goals  
3. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/21/millennials-spurred-growth-in-esg-investing-now-all-ages-are-on-board.html  
4. https://newsletter.fintechtakes.com/p/what-do-customers-want-from-fintech

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While many businesses have goals, few are moving towards them as successfully as Instabank. In its two years of operation, it has already issued loans totaling over $370 million in Norway and expanded into Finland. Like many other challenger banks, Instabank offers lending products through its website, but the bank has taken their goal of accessible lending one step further with the development of in-store payment solutions.

Their digital-forward approach to lending takes into account that not all purchases are planned and traditional payment methods, such as cash, debit, or credit, are not always the best option for customers.

So, what does this mean for the consumer who’s fallen in love with the couch in the shop window, but wasn’t expecting to make a large purchase?

Instabank provides a simple lending solution that’s available at the point of sale to provide shop customers with instant loan approval. To power the growth of this payment solution Instabank has partnered with a number of key businesses including Eplehuset (a leading retailer for Apple products in Norway) and Power (leading electronics chain across the Nordics), and in-store lending now accounts for a major portion of Instabank’s loan approvals.

It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly why instant loans have yet to become widely accessible, but managing risk and creating the tech solutions needed to provide instant access have played significant roles in the delay. However, these problems didn’t stop Instabank from creating a banking solution that is easy to use, is accessible where and when it’s needed, and enables the smooth flow of payments and services between consumers and businesses.

So, how do you build a challenger bank that is both ready to handle the complicated risk analytics that has traditionally slowed banks down, while creating banking products that are instantly accessible to consumers?

You hire innovative people to drive the business ahead, such as Instabank’s forward-thinking CTO Farzad Jalily. Farzad and his team are responsible for creating the technology solutions that not only provide a streamlined consumer experience, but are also scalable and adaptable. When asked about creating the architecture that can support Instabank’s business now and grow with them in the future Farzad said,

“I’ve been an architect and an enterprise architect, and you build up a dream architecture. I had all these wishes based on past mistakes and successes. At Instabank I could live out my dream, I could draw out the architecture and cherry-pick solutions and put them together using APIs.”

As a challenger bank, Instabank isn’t weighed down by the legacy systems that often prohibit big banks from innovating and Farzad sees his distributed architecture as a huge advantage over competitors, “All the banks small or big, have problems with their legacy solutions, which we don’t have. We use a micro integration platform instead of having a heavy, established API that you have to use a lot of money to build, so time to market and costs are really low because we use this kind of technology.” Farzad’s idea of using third-party services, which is a unique solution to banking technology needs, can be easily scaled to meet the changing needs of the business as it expands.

Like all other parts of the business, developing lending apps for in-store partner solutions is a fast and easily scalable process for the Instabank team. Their focus is on providing an easy and discrete application experience for customers. To do this they create simple solutions that use Provenir’s sophisticated analytics solution to manage the loan application processes.

Instabank’s partnership with a large furniture retailer in Norway is a great example of this. Instabank has replaced their existing payment solution to create a seamless financing option that can be completed at the point of purchase. Traditional financing options used to pay for large purchases are far from consumer friendly. In many shops, you fall in love with a couch or other big-ticket item that catches your eye, and then fill out pages and pages of paperwork to secure credit. This isn’t just a slow process, it’s cumbersome, archaic, and enough to put many customers off making a purchase.

Have you ever wished that applying for a small loan was as simple as sending a text message to your bank?

Instabank has created that option for the store’s customers.

Shoppers simply have to send a text message, and then answer a few follow up questions to apply for a loan in store. No paperwork, no wasted time, and best of all the application process takes under two minutes. The agreement can even be signed on your mobile phone. It’s an easy, simple, and efficient payment option for consumers. Once approved customers receive a barcode attached to their loan account that can be scanned in-store and topped up for future purchases.

Perhaps the most impressive development created by Farzad’s team is Upgrade—the app that’s powering early phone upgrades and Mac purchases at Norway’s leading retailer of Apple products. Incredibly the team created and launched the app used in store, to calculate the cost of upgrading and finance the purchase, in just 7 weeks.

To complete the valuation of the existing phone and apply for a loan to upgrade, customers simply need to complete a four-question application online. Their identity can be verified using Bank ID, which can then be used to automatically sign the agreement. Again, this easy financing solution takes care of the entire process from valuing the consumer’s current phone to calculating their loan rate.

This focus on meeting customers where they need them shows just how committed Instabank is to their motto ‘we don’t think like a bank we think like you’. Consumers value options and don’t always plan purchases ahead of time, getting an instant loan as part of the checkout process is a simple way of planning for a customer’s needs before they even develop!

If you’re wondering how Instabank manages to decision an application in just a few minutes, it’s not down to magic or lack of thorough decisioning processes. The decisioning speed is the result of sophisticated risk models combined with a fully automated risk decisioning system that eliminates delays and provides reliable risk answers. However, Instabank still thinks they can be faster!

For many businesses, completing a loan application in under two-minutes is a dream, but not for Instabank, who are currently planning to speed up their decisioning process through the use of microservices. Farzad told us, “If you want to score an applicant you need to run through the whole process, that is old-fashioned. If you can use microservices you can just use the part of the model that you need. In that way, you get an answer even faster.” Switching to this microservices approach will allow Instabank to run an application only through the parts of the process that are necessary to analyze that specific loan application.

Innovation is something that guides and drives Instabank, with future plans including expansion into new products and markets, and an ongoing mission to create the fastest and smartest risk decisioning process possible. And of course, continue to take banking to consumers, wherever they need it!