To advance the innovation, incubation, and scaling of climate FinTech solutions in Asia, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and a major tech company jointly launched the Point Carbon Zero Programme under MAS’ Project Greenprint. This programme aims to use climate FinTech solutions to improve financial sector access to precise and granular climate-related data, allowing for more effective deployment of capital toward green and sustainable projects.
“The effective employment of technology allows us to greatly enhance the quality, availability, and comparability of the ESG data needed to facilitate these financial flows, to accelerate our transition to a low-carbon economy. We see the Point Carbon Zero Programme as a key enabler for bridging ESG FinTechs, finance, and real economy businesses through a shared data and innovation platform,” says Dr Darian McBain, Chief Sustainability Officer, MAS. He added that Singapore’s financial and FinTech sectors can play a critical role in the efficient channelling of private capital toward long-term sustainable projects and businesses.
In support of the programme, a technology company will launch the world’s first open-source cloud platform dedicated to climate finance, facilitating the deployment of these climate FinTech solutions and their adoption by the financial sector.
Despite accounting for more than half of all startup investments globally, climate FinTech is still a relatively new sub-segment. As a result, the Program aims to accelerate the expected growth of climate FinTech solutions in Asia over the next three years.
To begin, FinTech firms and solution providers will be invited to submit innovative technological solutions to a variety of climate finance problem statements that have been co-crafted by stakeholders from the financial sector and the real economy.
On their ability to facilitate capital flows towards green and sustainable projects in Asia, 100 solutions will be shortlisted for further development and tested with a pool of 1,000 financial institutions. The programme also aims to equip 10,000 multinational corporations and small and medium-sized businesses with the ability to set, track, and achieve sustainability goals.
The programme’s main features are as follows:
- Mentorship and funding – Participants who are chosen for further consideration will get cash for solution development and mentoring from a tech company.
- Access to data – Participants can make use of the over 200 public datasets from various industries that are maintained by the tech company as well as the aggregated climate disclosure, environmental, and public utility data that Project Greenprint wants to collect. This information can be utilised to improve participant solutions’ precision in estimating sectoral and corporate-level carbon emissions as well as the effects of businesses’ actions to reduce these emissions.
- Manage own carbon footprint – Participants can use a Cloud’s Carbon Sense suite to track and lower their individual carbon footprints related to cloud usage.
- Facilitate data sharing – New climate-related datasets generated by these solutions may be made available to Project Greenprint’s partners with the consent of the data owners. This is consistent with the MAS’s goal of facilitating trusted and efficient flows of high-quality sustainability data to assist financial institutions in making sustainable finance and investment decisions.
The open-source cloud platform for climate financing has just been built by the tech company, and participants will be encouraged to use it to deploy their solutions. The platform, which is based in Singapore, will allow FinTechs to work with financial institutions to develop, host, and scale climate FinTech solutions by utilising the data management and carbon-neutral infrastructure of the cloud.
