The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has teamed up with Google Cloud to launch an environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) initiative, the Point Carbon Zero programme.
As part of the project, Google Cloud will launch an open-source cloud platform dedicated to climate finance.
MAS said the platform will facilitate the deployment of various climate-based fintech solutions and help in their adoption by the financial sector.
The programme is being implemented under the ambit of MAS’ Project Greenprint and will use climate fintech solutions to bolster the financial sector’s access to “accurate and granular climate-related data”, for more efficient deployment of capital towards green and sustainable projects.
Project Greenprint, which falls under the MAS Green Finance Action Plan, aims to harness innovation and technology to promote the green finance ecosystem to help financial institutions to monitor their sustainability commitments and quantify the risks and real-world impact of their portfolios.
Under the Point Carbon Zero programme, fintech firms and solution providers will be invited to submit technological solutions to address a range of climate finance problem statements co-crafted by stakeholders from the financial sector as well as companies seeking finance.
Shortlisted solutions
About 100 solutions will be shortlisted for further development and would be tested with a pool of 1000 financial institutions on their ability to facilitate capital flows towards green and sustainable projects in Asia.
Shortlisted participants would be provided mentorship by Google Cloud and also get funding to further develop their products.
Participants would also get access to aggregated climate disclosure, environmental and public utilities data that Project Greenprint aims to collect, and over 200 public datasets spanning different sectors that are hosted by Google Cloud.
Such data can be used to hone the accuracy of participants’ solutions in measuring sectoral and corporate-level carbon emissions, as well as the impact of firms’ efforts to reduce these.
Participants would also gain access to Google Cloud’s Carbon Sense suite, which allows them to track and reduce their own carbon footprint associated with their cloud usage.
Carbon Sense suite is Google Cloud’s collection of digital infrastructure services and tools for organisations to accurately manage their carbon emissions.
According to MAS, new climate-related datasets generated by these solutions can be made available to Project Greenprint’s partners, subject to data owners’ consent.
This is in keeping with MAS’ goal of facilitating trusted and efficient flows of high-quality sustainability data, to support financial institutions’ sustainable finance and investment decisions, the regulator said.
Empowering corporations
The programme also aims to empower 10,000 multinational corporations and small and medium-sized enterprises to set, track and achieve their sustainability targets.
Participants will be invited to deploy their solutions on Google Cloud’s open-source cloud platform dedicated to climate finance.
Anchored in Singapore, the platform will enable fintechs to collaborate with financial institutions to build, host, and scale climate fintech solutions, using Google Cloud’s carbon neutral infrastructure and data management capabilities, MAS said.
MAS’ chief sustainability officer, Darian McBain, said the effective employment of technology “allows us to greatly enhance the quality, availability and comparability of the ESG data needed to facilitate these financial flows, to accelerate our transition to a low carbon economy”.
“We see the Point Carbon Zero programme as a key enabler for bridging ESG fintech, finance, and real economy businesses through a shared data and innovation platform,” McBain said.
