CoGo and Experian Collaboration Will Provide Australians with Carbon Footprint Information Directly Within Their Digital Banking Apps
Carbon footprint tracking expert CoGo has announced a first-of-its kind collaboration with Experian (Australia), the world’s leading global information services company, that will help Australians to better understand the carbon emissions associated with spending. Powered by CoGo, banks who use Experian’s ‘Look Who’s Charging’ transaction categorisation solution will soon be able to offer consumers the ability to track their carbon emissions directly via their banking apps.
“Experian is committed to building a sustainable future. One way of doing this is reducing our collective environmental footprint. The work we’re doing with CoGo helps provide carbon emissions data to Australian consumers quickly and easily to help them make lower carbon choices,“ comments David Washbrook, Co-Founder & General Manager of Look Who’s Charging (an Experian company).
“Consumers are looking for greater transparency around their spending footprint and this is going to be much easier in future with Experian helping to facilitate this through Look Who’s Charging’s enrichment engine. Look Who’s Charging is already integrated with over 20 Australian financial institutions, including three of the big four banks, and those institutions will now also have the ability to let their customers see the carbon impact of their spend,” comments Ben Gleisner, CEO and Founder of CoGo.
CoGo is currently in discussions with several of Australia’s biggest banks around carbon footprint integration, amidst increasing demand from consumers and businesses for transparency around this kind of data.
Exponential impact
CoGo also believes that with banks empowering their customers to understand their footprint, they can make a much larger positive impact in Australia. “The collaboration has the opportunity to impact Australia’s entire carbon footprint by enabling repeatable, purposeful exchanges between the two biggest global contributors to over-consumption: businesses and consumers. That’s real change; and it’s exponential impact,” says Gleisner.
Last month the UK’s NatWest Group announced the integration of CoGo’s carbon footprint API into its core banking experience. The new feature is a UK banking first which allows customers to see the CO2 emissions associated with their daily spending. It also provides hints and tips on how to reduce emissions for doing so. Users are able to log their commitments and behaviour changes as well.
Insights from an earlier pilot with NatWest showed the average user saved approximately 11 kg of CO2 emissions per month by committing to behavioural changes that used less carbon – such as composting, or switching utilities providers. If this behaviour was replicated across NatWest’s 8 million customers who use the mobile app, it would save more than 1 billion kg of CO2 emissions per year, equivalent to planting 17 million trees.
About CoGo
CoGo is a free app and real-time API that helps consumers and businesses to understand, reduce and offset their carbon footprints, and align their spending with their environmental and social values. CoGo is powered by Open-Banking technology, and is integrated with 35 banks in the UK; 5 banks in NZ; and is expanding globally with over 100k consumer users in those markets. The CoGo API enables banks and other corporations to integrate carbon (and in time additional sustainability) data into their customer experiences – for example providing a bank customers their carbon footprint in the bank’s own mobile app. CoGo provides consumers a comprehensive, automated carbon footprint. Carbon reduction tips and actions allow consumers to understand the small steps they can make, and be recognised for the good they’re already doing.
Learn more at cogo.co
Source Experian Press Release
