London, June 7, 2023 — Connect Earth and Thought Machine have partnered to bring reliable carbon footprint data and carbon removal capabilities to banks and their customers through a simple API integration.
With an ever-growing focus on sustainability and climate change, consumers are expecting their banks to provide them with carbon footprint data associated with their everyday spending. For banks, the challenge to meet this consumer demand lies in finding reliable data sources that are easy to integrate and maintain. From a customer acquisition and retention perspective, this poses a real risk to banks as consumers are increasingly moving their accounts to more environmentally-conscious providers.
The partnership between API-first environmental data provider Connect Earth and cloud-native core banking and payments technology provider Thought Machine addresses these challenges directly.
Through this integration, which embeds Connect Earth’s API product, Connect Insights, with Thought Machine’s core banking platform, Vault Core, financial institutions can offer their customers educational insights into their personal carbon footprint based on their spending. This solution also includes a carbon credit functionality powered by Patch, a technology platform that enables businesses to take meaningful climate action. Banking customers can therefore learn about their carbon footprint and actively compensate for it by contributing to carbon removal or avoidance projects of their choosing.
“A significant challenge for many financial institutions is allocating the time and resources required to integrate new solutions into their product offering, particularly when these solutions exist outside of their core banking solution,” says Callum Campbell, Product Lead at Connect Earth. “We’re delighted to partner with Thought Machine to bring carbon footprint insights and carbon removal methods directly to their clients. Our joint solution with Patch allows Thought Machine clients to quickly and securely integrate our product with ease into their cloud-native core.”
“Consumers are eager for insights into how their banking and finance habits impact the climate. And beyond understanding that impact, they want to be empowered to take action to mitigate it,” said Jan Mertens, Vice President of Global Revenue at Patch. “The Connect Earth and Patch partnership will enable Thought Machine clients to do just that. Patch is excited to work together with these groups to make climate action simple for the banking sector.”
Key features:
- Ease of integration: Both Connect Insights and Thought Machine’s Vault Core are designed with a developer-first mindset, ensuring banks can integrate the solution directly into their banking application quickly and minimise time-to-market.
- Enable climate action and improve customer retention: The solution includes both carbon footprint insights and carbon credit purchasing functionality that empower customers to understand and actively reduce their emissions.
- Data and 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 carbon credit projects are vetted and verified before they are offered to customers.
- A partner for the future: Building the Connect Insights integration to Thought Machine’s Vault Core is only the beginning. Connect Earth offers a suite of API-focused solutions tailored to meet the growing sustainability-related needs of the financial sector. Examples include an embeddable carbon accounting solution for SMEs (Connect Report).
Already a Thought Machine customer? Learn more about our integration.
Not a Thought Machine customer? Contact Connect Earth to enquire about the integration.
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About Thought Machine:
Thought Machine has developed the foundations of modern banking with its cloud-native core banking and payments technology. Its cloud-native core banking platform, Vault Core, is trusted by leading banks and financial institutions worldwide, including Intesa Sanpaolo, ING Bank Śląski, Lloyds Banking Group, Standard Chartered, SEB, Lunar, Atom bank, Curve, and more.
Vault Payments is a cloud-native payments processing platform – comprising a Universal Payments Engine to support all card and account-to-account payment types.
The Vault platform has been written from scratch as an entirely cloud-native system and gives banks full control to build any product required to flourish in a rapidly changing world.
Thought Machine is currently a team of more than 600 people spread across offices in London, New York, Singapore, and Sydney, and has raised more than $500m in funding.
About Patch:
Patch is the technology platform making meaningful climate action a part of every business—no matter the size. They provide a growing cohort of carbon credit buyers with access to carefully vetted climate action projects across six continents. This enables buyers to confidently achieve climate impact they can trust, while project developers can scale their solutions at the critical pace the planet needs.
About Connect Earth:
Founded in 2021, Connect Earth is a London-based environmental data company that democratises easy access to sustainability data. With its carbon tracking API technology, Connect Earth is on a mission to empower consumers and SMEs to make sustainable choices and bridge the gap between intent, knowledge and action. Connect Earth supports financial institutions in offering their customers transparent insight into the climate impact of their spending.
