The Green Digital Finance Alliance and the Swiss Green Fintech Network, with the Swiss State Secretariat for International Financial Matters (SIF), have published the final version of the world’s first green fintech classification. The final report, entitled “Green Fintech Classification”, aims to serve as a tool to further mature and stimulate the green fintech market by providing policymakers, investors, and market players with a harmonized approach to the analysis and segmentation of green fintech markets.
The report provides an overview of the datasets that, if made accessible, could foster a broader range of green fintech innovations. Considering that the development of the fintech market last year was marked by a new wave of fintech solutions with green intent, the organization felt that the timing was right to introduce a green fintech classification. Initially, various classifications emerged based on digital lending, digital payment solutions, and digital asset management, which largely mirrored the segment of established financial products only in digital form.
New data sets and underlying infrastructure drove the second wave of fintech market development to develop entirely new digital financial products and services, built, for example, on programmable assets such as utility tokens or security token offerings.
The Green Digital Finance Alliance and the Swiss Green Fintech Network are now tapping into the industry’s desire to develop new types of commercial applications. This third wave is defined by fintech solutions that aim to align better the financial system and the behaviors of its players with green objectives.
“These solutions either unlock new and more advanced green finance or better align existing finance and capital flows with green goals. Given this recent wave in fintech market development, an updated taxonomy is in order. This report presents a clear classification of green fintech that will evolve,” the official statement reads.
The paper describes the following seven categories of green fintechs:
- ->Green digital payment and account solutions
- ->Green digital investment solutions
- ->Digital ESG data and analytics solutions
- ->Green digital crowdfunding and syndication platforms
- ->Green digital risk analytics and insurance technology solutions
- ->Green digital deposit and lending solutions
- ->Green digital asset solutions
- ->Green regtech solutions
The report also highlights the critical databases used by each category of green fintech. It provides an overview of datasets that, if made accessible, could foster a broader range of green fintech innovations.
“Open source datasets that have already enabled many green fintech innovations to include open-source Earth observation data from Copernicus and NOAA databases, carbon inventories and accounting databases, voluntary carbon credit registries, and open banking data infrastructures,” the release states.
Green fintechs use proprietary corporate databases managed by ESG data providers, often in combination with web scraping. IoT-generated, dynamic asset-level data is one of the most underutilized data categories.
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