With an ever-growing focus on sustainability and climate change, consumers are looking to banks to help them monitor and reduce their carbon footprint based on their lifestyle and everyday spending. For banks, the challenge to support this lies in finding reliable data sources that don’t take significant time and effort to integrate and maintain. The longer banks wait to tackle this problem, the more customers they lose, as consumers are increasingly moving their accounts to environmentally-conscious providers.
Thought Machine and Connect Earth's solution addresses these challenges directly.
By embedding Connect Insights into a banking app via data streaming APIs in Vault Core, banks can offer their customers educational insights into their personal carbon footprint based on their spending.
Each bank transaction returns a carbon emissions estimate. In addition, customers can learn more about how their day-to-day purchasing habits translate into carbon emissions through charts showing their emissions over time.
This solution also includes offset functionality powered by Patch. Banking customers can therefore learn about their carbon footprint and actively reduce it by contributing to an offset project of their choosing.
Data and offset projects you can trust
Connect Earth works with environmental experts to ensure the calculations, methodologies and emissions estimates are as accurate as possible.
Similarly, Patch ensures all available offset projects are vetted and verified before they are offered to customers.
Enable climate action and improve customer retention
71% of customers are more likely to choose a bank with a positive environmental impact. Thought Machine and Connect Earth have created a solution with integrated carbon data and offset functionality that empowers customers to understand and reduce their emissions.
Ease of integration
Both Connect Insights and Vault Core’s APIs are designed with a developer-first mindset, ensuring banks can integrate the solution directly into their banking application with ease to minimise time-to-market.
Connect Earth has built an integration to Thought Machine whereby Vault Core sends spend-based transaction details to relevant Kafka topics. The Kafka consumer developed by Connect Earth (which needs to be deployed on the same Kubernetes cluster as Kafka) identifies the transaction details. It then uses the Vault platform’s Core and Streaming APIs to receive additional transaction details to create an entire transaction message, and processes it with Connect Earth's API connectors. These transactions are then stored within Connect Earth's backend services and visualised on a front-end that can be flexibly developed by our banking partners.
The solution responds in real-time which gives users instant insights into the carbon emissions of their spending.
The solution is managed programmatically via Terraform and can be horizontally scaled within the same Kubernetes cluster.
