The Sustainable FinTech project was developed by the foraus Environment, Energy & Transport and Finance programmes. The project’s objective is to support the Swiss financial industry in meeting the climate goals decided in the Paris Agreement at the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference as well as to advance the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals. Sustainable FinTech serves as a platform and network to enable, encourage and foster innovative sustainable policies, services and product ideas which further these goals.
Mitigating global warming is one of the most pressing challenges of the 21st century. Increasingly, the financial sector is recognized as an actor of change, and its lending and investing decisions have become central to the climate finance agendas. Switzerland, with its important financial industry, is in the best position to be a global leader in sustainable finance. At the same time, digitization changes the way in which financial institutions do business. Disruptive technologies challenge the status quo and allow to experiment with new innovative business models – the term FinTech (financial technology) has been coined as a focal point of the modern financial industry.
In 2017, the Sustainable FinTech project successfully ran a series of expert workshops culminating in a climate fintech hackathon and subsequent refinement of the developed products and services. In 2018 and 2019, Sustainable FinTech further expanded the successful events of the previous year. A series of skunk workshops were held to develop concepts and recommendations for policymakers. For the F10 FinTech Hackathon in Zurich in March 2019, foraus, in cooperation with the FinTech Incubator and Accelerator F10, prepared a challenge for sustainability in the financial sector.
Further information can be found on our project website at sustainablefintech.ch. If you have any questions or would like to get involved, please contact us at hello@sustainablefintech.ch or meet us at one of our upcoming events.
We look forward to hearing from you!