This month at The Fintech Times, we are looking at Fintech for good: this encompasses companies looking to help the environment by managing carbon emissions and bringing them under control.
When a know-it-all (schmegegge in Yiddish) brutally established that fintechs who made money were inherently bad, as anyone who wasn’t not-for-profit, was evil and selfish, we at The Fintech Times set out to prove them wrong by reaching out to a variety of for-profit companies across the US, offering alternative solutions to banking, access to finance, remittances and more for minority communities and elaborate on the positive impact they were having. Check out the introductory article here.
Kentaro Karamorwi is the founder and CEO at Persefoni, the SaaS platform with a fully integrated suite of carbon management and sustainability reporting tools. Prior to founding Persefoni, Karamowri was the youngest Chief Digital Officer ever at a Fortune 500 company. His career has focused on the software space and includes time spent as a Cloud strategy consultant at Accenture and a Venture Partner focused on early-stage SaaS companies.
He writes his letter to Dr. Schmegegge to explain how technology has now reached a point that it can be used to help decarbonise the planet, resulting in there being less risk to the economy:
Hello Dr. Schmegegge,
The newly released report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides scientific validation for what each one of us has experienced first-hand, especially in the last two years – the realities of climate change are already here and manifesting themselves across the planet. The science and physical impacts are devastating, but the acceleration of responsible capitalism provides a necessary glimmer of hope.
Carbon risk is financial risk, and companies across industries – and their investors – must play a key role in the global fight against climate change. We need business, financial markets, and technology innovators to push harder than ever. Politics will always get in the way of fast-enough progress, but for the first time, we can realistically and quickly harness market forces to decarbonise the planet.
Breakthrough technology innovations, such as Persefoni, are doing their part to help accelerate this by arming organisations with the data necessary to properly manage and report on both their carbon emissions and financed emissions.
Established in 2020, Persefoni is a first-of-its-kind, enterprise-scale platform for carbon accounting, management, and reporting real-time across a number of global standards. The Persefoni Intelligent Carbon Management Platform factors operational activity data and financial activity data in real-time, enabling enterprises to systematically lower the environmental impact by turning raw data aggregated across multiple business units into data-driven, actionable insights. It does this with full transparency, leveraging the GHG Protocol, and thus radically simplifies the auditing process. Offered as a service, enterprises see a full Scope 1-3 map of their carbon footprint, parsed into consumption buckets – like “assets” and “people activities” – that are easy for business unit managers to track and tackle.
Since its genesis, Persefoni has spent considerable effort to bridge the gap between the disparate worlds of Sustainability and Technology, with the goal of combatting climate change worldwide. The company is already working with leading investors like global Private Equity firm TPG to manage the carbon footprint of its $85billion dollar portfolio. Already this year, Persefoni has earned numerous awards and industry recognition for its sustainability efforts and innovation – including the winner of the Enterprise and Smart Data category at the 13th annual SXSW Pitch event. Additionally, Persefoni was recently chosen as one of ten winners of Amazon‘s inaugural AWS Clean Energy Accelerator Program, among more than 200 global entries, and named a Top Product of 2021 by Environmental + Energy Leader.
We’re at a turning point in the fight against climate change. Technology is finally ready to help us bring carbon emissions under control, and delivering decarbonisation as a service through modern cloud data analytics is the breakthrough that will help us stop climate change before it ruins our economy.
Best,
Kentaro Karamorwi
Founder, CEO at Persefoni
