On the 5 February, we gathered at CYP in Puls 5 for our fourth Meetup, this time to discuss green lending in developing countries. The Meetup was organised in partnership with ResponsAbility, a leading asset manager in development investment, and the Global Climate Partnership Fund (GCPF). On this occasion, ResponsAbility officially presented its challenge for the upcoming F10 Fintech Hackathon in Zurich on the 22-24 March, seeking a FinTech solution for the collaboration processes between green lending actors. Our Meetup was an opportunity for the ResponsAbility and GCPF to receive and engage with inputs from the audience.
Following a brief introduction of foraus and Sustainable FinTech, our event partners were presented by Antoine Prédour, the head of GCPF. Mr Prédour outlined GCPF’s mission, the type of projects they fund and their main regions of intervention. He stressed the importance of the relations with local private financial institutions as a bridge to foster greener solutions in terms of both investments and private consumption approaches. On this note, he gave the floor to David Mazaira, a specialist at ResponsAbility, who entered into more the detail on the green lending challenge by GCPF.
Antoine Prédour and David Mazaira from ResponsAbility/GCPF discussed several questions with members of the audience over the course of the evening.
Mr Mazaira described the green lending project using the example of a private consumer who intends to buy an air conditioning unit in Vietnam. Vietnam’s economic growth and the increasing purchasing power of a large part of the population will cause a significant rise in greenhouse gas emissions over the next decades, exacerbating the severity of climate change effects in the region and inevitably also globally. A large part of these emissions are produced by cooling systems. Today, GCPF’s funding of sustainable investments, such as end-consumer purchases of green-label air conditioning units, relies on an assessment process of several steps. The challenge for the F10 FinTech Hackathon participants is to innovate a digital tool which would create a direct line between the purchaser, the financial institutions and GCPF. Such a tool would both increase awareness about sustainable solutions for end-consumers, and facilitate and speed up the financing of green investments.
The presentation gave an interesting insight into the challenges GCPF faces in their current work in developing countries and description of the hackathon challenge was met by well thought out questions and feedback from the audience, providing valuable input for the challenge sponsors. After the official part of the evening had been wrapped up, discussions flowed over to the apéro directly across from the venue kindly hosted by ResponsAbility in their cafeteria. A good half of the event’s participants stayed until late in the evening, with conversations continuing in small groups over a generous supply of drinks and food.
Lively discussions continued until late in the evening at the apéro hosted by ResponsAbility.
We are pleased that our Meetup sparked such lively discussion on the topic and are very much looking forward to the Hackathon – we cannot wait to find out what solutions will be brought to the table for this challenge.
If you would like to find out more about the Hackathon, follow this link. The registration deadline to participate is the 1 March.
