Carbon Insights: Empowering consumers to make more sustainable decisions

Carbon Insights helps people to learn about the CO2 impact of their purchases based on payment data and a personal profile. In addition, we give educational tips on how to lower your carbon footprint. By applying the lean startup method, we were able to accelerate innovation and be the first Dutch bank to make this available within the consumer banking app.

Problem

Consumers have a significant role to play in combatting climate change. They make approximately 35,000 choices per day. People are worried and want to contribute to a more sustainable future. However, we discovered it is difficult to make sustainable choices since the environmental impact of products you buy is often unknown due to a lack of transparency. Current solutions to calculate your carbon footprint are based on self-report.

We validated the customer problem by setting up a smoke test with a landing page of the value proposition and conducting interviews with people that showed interest. This allowed us to quickly discover the motivations and pains, while measuring the engagement of our early adopters: people that started making conscious choices and want to do better. We see that people using this solution are from various age groups, motivated by contributing to a sustainable future.

Opportunity

Rabobank is at the core of processing payment data to help our customers make better financial decisions. Calculation models from our partner Ecolytiq, allow us to calculate CO2 emissions based on transaction data. This opens the opportunity to show the full picture of payments, by providing both financial and environmental insights, to empower people to make better decisions at scale and drive sustainable change.

The main business value of this proposition is the clear fit with the strategy of the bank to create a better world together. To accelerate the innovation process, we built an MVP to find evidence for the most critical assumptions and validate that people want this.

Solution

We learned that people value CO2 insights when it reflects on the choices they make. Therefore, we scouted for a start-up that takes personal behavior into the calculation and can provide customized educational content.

The design combines the interactions people are used to in their daily online banking, with interactive elements that help people with their most common questions: What is my current CO2 impact? How well am I doing compared to others? Which spending category has the biggest impact? How is this calculated? What can I do to lower my impact?

Impact

On Earth Day, April 2022, Carbon Insights was launched within the Rabobank consumer App while giving access to a group of pilot customers. Our first-use survey shows that more than half of the participants became more aware of their CO2 impact and a substantial part of our long-term users have made more sustainable decisions.

In this process, we learned that design can make a meaningful impact and drive change toward a more sustainable world. With this in mind, we continue to further scale this solution while designing for behavioral change.