FootprintLab, CBA, ValAI and Fintech Australia at Intersekt

FootprintLab, CBA, Fintech Australia, Digital Agricultural Services and ValAI shared a panel in the future of green fintech in Australia at Intersekt 2025. The panel was sandwiched between the launch of Australia’s National Climate Risk Assessment and the subsequent announcement of the new 2035 emissions target. Ben Brazier from CommBank shared what banks can do at the interface between society and money, Ally Todd from ValAI shared how their solution supports banks and their customers by helping to lower household emissions, Sarah Gorman from Digital Agricultural Services and Chair of Fintech Australia shared how they can help identify where climate risks are in lending and investment portfolios so that banks and their loan or investment recipients can take early action. Of course we shared our perspective - the carbon footprint behind every transaction - how we spend, lend and invest - can and should be known so that fully informed decisions can be made.

Full transcript below:

Green Tinted Glasses: A Sustainability Lens on Fintech — Intersekt 2025

Transcript:

MC: This panel is the green tinted glasses to go along with the green tinted outfits we have on stage. It's looking at sustainability a sustainability lens on fintech. And so I'm going to introduce our fantastic moderator Janet Salem, co-founder of Footprint Lab to take it away.

Janet: So thanks for the intro. I'm Janet Salem from FootprintLab and we're sort of the bottom of this pyramid because all we do is provide the ESG data to FinTex so that they can use that as a transaction data enrichment and then do amazing things for society with that data. So I'd like to first allow the panelists to introduce themselves and then we're going to kick it off. Alice, we'll start with you.

Allys: Hi everybody. Yeah, Allys Todd from ValAI. We provide data and digital engagement tools to enterprise customers. So our biggest product in market is heat under the brand Home Efficiency Australia.

Ben: Hi everyone, I'm Ben Brazier from the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. I lead the retail bank's environmental and social strategy. Really excited to be here today because we work with a number of fintechs to deliver our strategy.

Sarah: Hi there. I'm wearing two hats here today. So, chair of Fintech Australia. So, fantastic to have our fellow panelists here. And then my other hat is as head of growth and marketing at DAS, which is an agri fintech that's working at the intersection of climate, AI, agriculture, and finance and we're solving for the blind spot in rural land which is one of the massive gaps in finance.

Janet: Amazing. So I want to give a little intro to this session because ESG can sort of be a nice little add-on in some ways. But what we're going to talk about is where ESG takes the front stage when it comes to fintech. Now why fintech? Fintech has a very low footprint itself. But if you work in climate change long enough, you know that money is driving climate change and other environmental impacts and money and those financial decisions, how we spend, lend, invest, that is what chooses the winners and the losers in the market. And so what we're trying to do with ESG in fintech is help inform those decisions, make it easier for people to know how they are contributing to or could support different solutions and where they stand. So if we look at who's at the interface between society and money, it is banks. And that's why banks are really at the front line when it comes to a lot of these sustainability matters and how policies are chosen. And that's why banks are starting to become sort of ESG service providers and maybe even a marketplace for different solutions so that the amazing solutions that come up don't have to go to market themselves and overload everyone. So in this panel what's really nice about it is we have Ben from the bank who's kind of trying to find these solutions for their customers. Some of which they can do in-house and then some of which they need to bring in specialists to deliver really good value. So I did want to start with Ben and ask if you could just unpack what's in it for the bank. Sometimes the bank has to do it, it's corporate responsibility, there's some regulations, so there's that point of view, financed emissions would be interesting actually, but then there's also what's the business case? Is this actually good for acquiring or retaining customers? So if you could touch on both what's in it for you guys.

Ben: Great question and thanks very much. The bank's primary aim is to support our customers and hence why we're doing these ESG initiatives and I work in the retail bank. So that's moms and dads, families, everyday people that we're supporting. What's in it for the customers is a better question than what's in it for the banks. And so if we focus on emissions reduction, what that means for customers is solar battery on their homes, EVs on their driveways. Cost of living is a real pressure at the moment for customers. These clean energy solutions can help customers save money every day. And then equally floods, fires, cyclones are having real impacts for our customers in these very damaging events. How can we both protect the bank from those scenarios, but also protect our customers and make sure that they're building their resilience to those things? So it really starts first with the customers and how we support them. Then it goes to the Australia level and we've made commitments around financed emissions and reducing our own impact in order to support Australia's transition to a clean energy economy. We take that role really seriously as a big player in Australia. So it's not that we have these commitments and we have to report on them and hence that's why we're doing it. We made the commitments because we want to support the transition and now we're working out how do we deliver on those commitments to reduce our emissions and our financed emissions. And then probably the big thing changing for large corporations is the Australian sustainability reporting standards which are coming into effect this year. Putting a greater onus on people's annual disclosures to say what are their strategies, what are the risks, what are the opportunities related to environment and that's putting more governance and more structure around how we share information about meeting targets, managing risks and those things. So that's really important for the bank as well.

Janet: But what happens if you didn't do any of the job? Let's say they say, "Okay, Ben, thanks very much. We're going to put you in customer service now and close it down." Isn't there any impact on the bank's bottom line? I mean, or is there risk like what there must be something inherently business case relevant to why this ESG really matters for the bank to the extent that they set up their whole teams to deliver.

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. So, if I think about on the risk side of it, the home loan portfolio is the biggest portfolio for the retail bank. Floods, fires are becoming more frequent, more severe, and those homes, which are primarily housing customers and keeping them safe, are also securities on the bank's lending portfolio. So, assessing and managing that risk is a really important part of our ESG agenda. And then there's this social impact piece of we've made these commitments to shareholders, to the public, that we're going to make progress on emissions, that we're going to play our role in Australia's transition. We now have to live up to those expectations and make really serious efforts to try and meet those targets. And that's a really important driver as well.

Janet: So let's say who here has a home loan or has had a home loan? Okay. So I wonder if your banks have contacted you about some sort of energy efficiency measure or sustainability measure that you can take to reduce the impact. Anyone? No. Oh, one over there. No. There was a thumbs down. Okay. So this is my question. So you've assembled a portfolio of solutions for home loan recipients because their emissions are your financed emissions. How do you then communicate with them because you've got to compete with all your other colleagues who want to communicate to customers about anti-fraud and whatever else is going on. Is there a sort of a sweet spot of when you communicate to customers about ESG that enables a higher rate of uptake?

Ben: Yeah, it's a great question for this forum as well because we see fintech often thinking about that behavioural science piece and how to engage customers really really well and that's really important on this topic but the question I think is broader than just communications. Communications is one part of it and it's that initial awareness piece that brings it to the front of people's busy life to-do lists. So this is the moment that I want to think about solar or I want to think about a battery. But beyond that then there's education because these decisions are really complicated on whether you want to get solar battery EV and that's where we work with partners like Valai and the home energy assessment tool or an EV calculator to do that cost comparison and say does this make sense to me financially as well as my environmental aims. And then you've got the complexity of finding an installer and I'm sure you may not have been contacted by your banks but I'm sure you've all seen like zero cost solar and these adverts that go out there. It's really hard to find a trusted installer who's going to give you exactly what you want. So, we can play a role in facilitating that. And then at the end of that is the offers and lending and financial proposition that can help people get over the line if they don't have the cash flow. So yes, there's some really important times to talk to a customer like not in the middle of settlement because there's bigger things going on, but when they're dreaming about what renovations when they've been in for a year and now they're starting to think, what do I want to do to this place, those things come through. But it has to be this end-to-end experience that really helps the customer navigate quite a complicated area that's more important than communications.

Janet: Okay. So if I'm a home loan customer and you've gotten a bit of email real estate from your marketing colleagues and I've clicked on the link that says, "Hey, Val AI can reduce our finance emissions. They can help you save on household energy." And I click on it. Why did I do that, Alice? What do I have to do to engage? And what am I getting out of it as a household?

Allys: Yeah. I'll unpack that question a little bit. Thank you. Essentially we know from behavioural studies that we've done with Harvard's behavioural science unit that when it comes to Aussies we're savvy but we're time poor. And we also get a bunch of advertising on all different platforms all the time. What's important for the Australian consumer is knowing what helps them trigger action. When it comes to behavior change, Australians are also really slow to do things. The biggest reason that people would click on a link to do with anything to do with their house or their home or their lifestyle is because in Australia, homes are one of the most important and largest investments that you do make when it comes to financial services. And also Australians are very attached to Colgate brands. Once you've found your financial institution, your insurer, the person that you regularly purchase from, they become a brand that's very trusted and you become very sticky to them for good and bad unfortunately. But what is important is when we communicate messages to an Aussie. We also know from the research that Aussies don't trust anything they get from any of their Colgate brands and they also want to go off and do their own research. So people do like to discover but then what will happen is we need a reason to be able to bring them back to help them make a decision. So the work that we've done is really identifying for an Australian consumer what is a call to action, what's the CTA that matters to them or their home and their habits. Why in the past haven't they made good decisions or why haven't you taken up the solar before? One of the biggest reasons is because you'd love to, but we all have a to-do list every single day. And climate or energy goes to the bottom of that list when you've got multiple other competing demands on you every day. Plus, it gets overwhelming, doesn't it? You have to sort out which provider and what size. So the most important thing we do is we communicate to Australians in a language that makes sense to them, which is what's in it for me, how much is this going to cost me, what's the ROI, and how have you made it frictionless and seamless for me to be able to engage in this? And so by having an end-to-end solution that supports people in their decision-making and having that coupled with a Colgate brand that you already have a level of trust in, you're much more likely to take action. And once you've been educated and there's a bit of uplift and you've done this, the best thing that you can see is someone going to the pub or to the bowls club or to the surf life-saving club and you can hear them after a beer having a conversation about how great this product is or this service is and it becomes an ownership status because for them it's about their home and they're very proud of what they've done. Here's my app about my energy plan. That's the sort of thing that we like to create with sticky decision support tools because it means that the consumer has ownership over what happens in the future to themselves, their home and their habits.

Janet: Can you paint me a picture? So I've clicked on the app, I've downloaded it or integrated it into my Commbank app. What have I done do you think? What's a good scenario? Have I bought batteries, solar? Am I using my appliances more efficiently? What's a best case or good case you'd be proud of?

Allys: I think what's important is any consumer can use a tool like this. It's completely free. You don't need to be a customer of that bank. What's more important from a fintech lens is we do have some novel tech at play in there to be able to help you with your own adventure when it comes to electrifying your home. One of them is CDR. The ability for you to toggle open energy data within there. It helps you look at your payback financial returns and the ROI. That's important. So it doesn't matter which, because every home in Australia is unique and different. It doesn't matter what the interventions or the uplift is for your home. What matters is that the data that you're receiving is simple for you to understand. It's in plain and easy to understand language. It is giving you information that's data-accurate about your own home in terms of energy use and more importantly it's talking to you about the financial returns for yourself. So it makes sense economically and financially for you to participate.

Janet: Beautiful. And I love that you mentioned CDR because Australia is the only country with open energy data which is a really nice and innovative digital public infrastructure initiative of the government. And it's one of the things I sort of wonder why we don't leverage that more often, as we want to become competitive. So I wanted to ask Sarah with your Fintech Australia chair hat. We've got clean tech in Australia, we've got fintech, but can you tell us where you see the future for the sort of ESG tech and why is that different from the two?

Sarah: Absolutely. First of all, I'd say that we're at the best fintech festival that's happening in Asia Pacific. What we're seeing in and around the rooms are fintexs that have been innovating in how we lend, how they get paid, how we save, how we invest in wealth, etc. And in the first decade of fintech with Fintech Australia celebrating its 10 years, we've seen that first wave of innovation and it's been incredible. We've seen the Airwallexs, the Afterpays, the Upbanks come forward. My prediction as chair is that in the next 10 years we're going to be seeing a completely new wave of fintex come forward and in that new wave we're going to see a huge range of green fintex and ESG related techs. It's not going to be just of one kind like a Val AI, we're actually going to see not just the horizontal but we're going to see multiple verticals in this space and what good would look like to me is that if I come back in even two or three years time, I see this entire room filled with different kinds of green/ESG fintechs because we're all playing in lots of different spaces. And what I would say also is that this is 100% key to financial innovation in this country. Climate volatility, nature volatility, this is financial volatility. And if we don't get this right, ESG is not a nice to have. It's critical. It's critical infrastructure. And that's the other thematic that is running through Intersect more broadly in that there is an infrastructure thematic that is emerging today of this foundational infrastructure that our fintechs provide.

Janet: Absolutely. And what's probably very relevant, I don't know if anyone's seen headlines about the National Climate Risk Assessment Report that was released. Great news if you are a screenwriter for a disaster film because you got some good fodder in there. Not so great if you have a huge loan portfolio. One of the findings of the report was that up to $40 billion will be wiped from the economy every year by 2050. One of the main issues is that a lot of people who hold a home loan will default because they are in disaster-prone areas. And then a lot of homeowners or wanting to be homeowners, they won't have access to insurance or may not be able to get a mortgage because of where that home is located. So, there's huge risk. Another risk is when we're lending to the agricultural sector which is very much at risk of different types of climate change. So question to you Sarah, now with your Digital Agricultural Services or DAS hat: let's say Ben's been promoted to CEO of Commbank and now has to understand how exposed they are to climate risk. Have they lent to sectors or businesses that will be affected by this $40 billion wiping of the economy? How can you help him with DAS understand where the risks are and how to manage them?

Sarah: Congratulations to Ben who's just had an instant promotion. Matt would be looking forward to seeing that happen. Look, I think most of the banks have very good visibility into their retail portfolios of which bank Ben is across, right? Where they don't have good visibility traditionally is in their wholesale portfolios, specifically agriculture and also commercial. Now, the problem with this at the moment is that portfolios are shifting as well. Ben and I were chatting earlier and we were talking about how a lot of loans or rural loans are actually now hiding in retail portfolios. That's being driven by a number of trends including the fact that one in four loans are now written by brokers for customers in regional and rural areas. The problem with this is that there's a knock-on effect that's happening. Not only is farmland the blind spot in retail or wholesale portfolios, but there's a whole lot of things that at a consumer level we actually don't think about. One of those is that when you get a mortgage the number one thing that has to happen is actually mortgage insurance. What's going to happen in this country, as it is already happening around the world, is that if it's not insurable, it's not investable. That is the blunt truth of the matter. You cannot get a mortgage if you cannot get insured. In the regional areas as we see climate risk, there's going to be more storms, more floods. We were talking about floods being of particular impact across New South Wales. For DAS itself, what we're doing is providing visibility and credibility on this. Data and the foundations of data is always the answer here, but it's also in a way that's going to be good for communities. Again, and this is just because it was on my mind because we were talking about it pre-panel, it's around win-win solutions. So if a CBA, for instance, can see the immediate impact of a flood or fire on its retail portfolio and contact instantly its customers that have been impacted in those rural regional areas, guess what? That trust from the bank suddenly goes up. At the moment, most banks, most financial providers in this country cannot even tell you where those customers are, let alone contact them after an event. So, we've both got from climate near-term: tell me how it's impacting my customers so I can extend my customer experience. Then you've actually got translating really complex climate models into ways that can be more easily understood. For instance, with DAS, we've done recently just top of mind is taking really complex climate models and putting that into data and insights that can be understood. So what's a 2030 or a 2050 prediction on rainfall for my property? Because that delta between what you know about your property today versus what you actually could know is huge. And I think that in years to come when you buy property, you're not going to be just looking at is it close to a cafe or is it in a good green zone, etc. You're going to be saying, is it going to be affected by a flood? Is it going to be affected by a fire? And you're going to be looking at non-financial signals as well. How productive is the land, for instance? And certainly the banks are looking at this. They already know what you spend on your coffee. They're going to be looking at whether your house is in a fire or a flood zone.

Janet: Fantastic. So, we've got the two sides of ESG here. I'll bring it back to the risk assessment report this week, which helps us understand what do we need to adapt to and the need to we've got solutions from a fintech perspective of how to support the risk side of things and knowing maybe where we can intervene. That report will also help to inform the emissions target of how Australia is going to set its goals to prevent climate change and we're expecting a quite ambitious target which can only be achieved with pretty heavy-handed policies whether they're climate taxes or limitations or whatever. And so when it comes to the reductions side of those financed emissions or the households or the providers, I think that's where Allys's solutions can come in. So the adaptation and the mitigation support to the bank. So I just want to open to anyone—anyone have a great solution to pitch or any questions to the bank or service providers on how they see the future of ESG.

Sarah: Well, can I just turn the tables a little bit on you Janet because one of the great joys of being here on the panel is seeing the collaboration between say the bank and our beautiful emissions company here. But I want to hear more about your company, Janet.

Janet: So for us: I am an environmentalist by background, worked for the UN for many, many years. One of the gaps is you can't really have ambitious climate action if businesses can't make the right decisions. And so with Footprint Lab, we see that the data is already there. It's just about getting it into those data workflows and so we provide data as a service to banks or to fintexs or ESG tech and they can just pretty easily use it as a data enrichment. As of today, as of 10 years ago, it's possible to know the carbon footprint of any transaction anywhere in the world. Huge opportunity now is in global digital public infrastructure. Lots of efforts are being led by the EU, Singapore, Chile and New Zealand through the digital economy partnership initiative to link up all these digital economy tools and then harmonize ESG accounting globally. So it's a huge space if you do get into adding ESG to your solution or coming up with a new one. It is something that can travel abroad as well and be competitive. We've seen good traction there. Any questions?

Audience question: Yeah. It's more like a statement than a question. I've personally, not in my professional capacity, been doing a lot of environmental campaigning and actions as well. I think a lot of people like me have been quite disillusioned in terms of we see all that ESG targets, ESG campaigns by big organizations. We shareholders get all these reports. Put it very very simple: if I apply for a home loan with Commonwealth Bank today, Commonwealth Bank is not going to give me a discount because I have a 10 kilowatt or going to a 10 kilowatt solar panel. I guess when are we going to see with the data and all the initiatives that we have? We already have the data. There's no dispute that we already have data and the trends and the analysis. How can we encourage business and are there any plans, any initiatives? Does it need to be regulations to encourage business to actually be more deliberate in their customer and business approaches when, for example, as Carrington Labs I want to expand into Southeast Asia, I want to get a business loan. Oh you are very active in your ESG, done very well ESG. I give you half a percent discount, something along those lines. I help you to develop them to market.

Janet: Green loans. Have you got them?

Ben: Yeah, I can talk to that. So we do a range of discounted loans for environmental and social purposes both in the retail bank for electric vehicles, for solar, battery as well as in the business bank and institutional bank with our sustainability-linked loans. One of the key developments in this is the Australian sustainable finance taxonomy which we're really hoping drives a greater benefit for the banks in terms of funding which we can then pass on to customers and create that incentive. We also previously had a product where we did discounted home loans for very sustainable homes but actually homes in Australia were not meeting that standard yet. The product was there before the homes were at that standard and hence the focus has shifted to upgrading the existing stock, getting people to put solar battery and making that as cheap as possible—combining the government rebates, great lending deals, offers on the batteries or on the solar systems—and we think that's the path to success. So there is a lot of space at work in that space both on the business side and the retail side.

Allys: And there's other instruments at play too in the Australian market. It's all about timing. Policy and legislation is getting there. Incentivization and grants are there too. One of the gaps in the Australian market compared to the UK market particularly and some of the east coast US is minimum standards for properties. So we're talking about both commercial industrial businesses but also with houses. The minimum standards in Australia we do know need to be lifted. There are mandatory standards that are coming into effect. It's just a timeline now for us to upgrade those homes for that to occur. So you will not be able to in this country buy or rent a property unless it meets certain standards. But again, because the majority of Australian homes are in quite an inefficient state right now, we're looking at ways in which we can pull levers to uplift the properties so that we can enforce those minimum standards and have a trickle down effect. It does mean for political campaigners such as yourself and those that do feel there's been a real lag in terms of climate action, it's a wave of time but we've seen from the government this year, particularly this week putting out that climate results, this is setting up the instrument for social license. These were things that were reviewed 15 years ago by global reinsurers. The data's already been there about these things. It's about consumers feeling comfortable having these in their discussion points.

Janet: And I think it's great. So you've highlighted there is still a gap. So fintech in the audience, if you're in personal financial management, if you're in mortgage, lending, reg tech, keep an eye on the green space. It is a huge opportunity. So thank you very much to the panelists. Thank you.