After our last blog on the recommender system and its application in the banking sector, we decided to showcase one of our new exciting products currently under development and the different steps we took to validate the need for such a carbon footprint analyzer.

Genify’s objective is to improve people’s consumption behavior in order to raise awareness and decrease pollution for a cleaner future.

For instance, the UAE (United Arab Emirates) is often accused of causing severe environmental challenges to the planet. The main reasons include the region’s exploitation of natural resources, a consumption increase due to high population growth, and the possession of one of the greatest energy demands on the planet. The temperature rise (it sometimes feels like 45°C during summer!) caused by global warming begets the region’s water scarcity, rising sea level, aridity, and drought.

However, environmental problems and climate change are not just local issues but rather global troubles. The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) holds that “[s]ea levels are rising and oceans are becoming warmer. Longer, more intense droughts threaten crops, wildlife, and freshwater supplies. From polar bears in the Arctic to marine turtles off the coast of Africa, our planet’s diversity of life is at risk from the changing climate.” WWF concludes that “[c]limate change poses a fundamental threat to the places, species and people’s livelihoods” [1].

This is why we, at Genify, are currently building a brand-new product — the carbon footprint analyzer. This smartphone app product will analyze each customer’s monthly transactions and provide a detailed monthly CO2 emission score and recommendations to curb this number in the following months, hence becoming more and more eco-friendly. It is essentially an add-on to mobile apps offered and operated by banks that can be accessed directly from within a banking app. By doing so, we hope people in this region will become more conscious about Global warming and environmental issues.

Key product specs of Genify’s carbon footprint analyzer

• API for provision of CO2 footprint for every single bank card transaction

• Granular calculation of footprint, per vendor (McDonald’s vs. salad bar) or per item purchased (groceries categories)

• Update of reference CO2 footprint according to the latest practices and official norms

• Generation of end-of-month and end-of-year formatted CO2 summary reports (email or app notification)

Figure 1 — Mockup of Genify’s carbon footprint analyzer’s user experience

Banks and fintechs worldwide are starting to adopt such solutions. This is why Genify quickly saw the opportunity to first develop its solution on the Emirates soil — one of the top emerging markets at this time — and then extend it to other regions.

Figure 2 — Similar solutions from other banks and fintech

Carbon footprint emissions from consumers are usually divided into four main categories — Home (water, toilet paper, gas, etc…), Food (eggs, rice, meat, etc.), Travel (plane, car, bus, etc.) and Things one uses daily (smartphone, etc.).

Figure 3 — User experiences of carbon footprint analyzers from BNP Paribas [2] and Alipay

Alipay also believes that if its users can be effectively encouraged to lead a low-carbon lifestyle, it will benefit China’s environmental footprint and, and the long term, benefit everyone [3]. That is why Alipay uses gamification: because they get immediate information about their carbon footprint in a fun and competitive way. As per result, 200 million people in China are greening their lives. Hence, mobile finance plays a huge role in fighting against climate change and raising awareness among people [4].

Figure 4 — Alipay uses gamification to engage its customers fight against global warming

To better understand our target population’s needs for our product, we decided to submit a survey [5] — region agnostic — which was then distributed via Facebook groups. We conducted our survey on the UAE market to aptly and efficiently develop Genify’s products to the region of interest.

3 impactful insights from our survey

• Generation Y (both Male and Female) is concerned about the environment and most of them currently adapt their consumption behavior (mostly home and food) to help decrease global warming

• As opposed to the government, an app installed on their smartphones would be the most trustworthy way to make this population consume less and become more environmentally friendly

• A smartphone app analyzing people’s environmental impact and giving access to future personalized consumption trends would make most people definitely change their consumption behavior

That is good news because it shows that Genify’s product will undoubtedly be effective for its target population. Indeed, the new generation is precisely the one we aim for because they are keener to use their mobile devices and are more receptive to digital data than older generations.

Through our research and survey, we believe that building our product would hold many benefits as our consumers would trust us with their data. In turn, the outcome of our product would improve consumer behavior.

Additional findings from our survey

Thanks to our survey, we also found additional insights.

• Most of the respondents nowadays take into account their carbon footprint emission when shopping both online and offline

• Home and Food are the two categories where people’s consumption behavior becomes more and more eco-friendly, as opposed to categories like Travel

• A majority of the survey participants assessed that they would be ready to change their consumption behavior if governmental laws were enacted, leading one to think that a part of the problem could potentially be solved via more robust public regulations.

Limitations

Our survey has a limited number of respondents (just above 50) which, even though is a satisfying amount, can hardly represent the whole targeted population. Moreover, the middle 80% of the respondents are young participants, aged between 20 and 25, and the rest of the respondents are aged over 30. Therefore, it is hard to draw statistically significant conclusions and observe trends for this upper part of the population. Nonetheless, we can learn directional insights from it.

Conclusion

Despite the limitations seen above, our survey confirmed Genify’s idea that a carbon footprint analyzer would be a great product to build and commercialize and that people — at least the younger generation —are increasingly aware of environmental challenges in this region.

A positive finding to point out is that most respondents would be ready to change and adapt their consumption behavior to become more climate-friendly. This is excellent news and something that Genify thrives to assist in!

References

[1] Effects of Climate Change
[2] BNP Paribas’ carbon footprint analyzer product (French)
[3] Alipay raises environmental awareness
[4] Wunderman Thompson
[5] Genify’s Carbon Footprint Survey

About the author

Hi! I’m Aymeric Bouvier, a graduate student researcher in Autonomous Driving and AI at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. I am also currently interning as a Business Development Strategist at Genify.ai, where I focus on emerging markets such as the UAE or Egypt.