Have you ever thought about how your phone could help you live a more sustainable life? Alexis Normand did. Alexis leveraged his experience in the connected health industry and passion for the environment to fight climate change through technology. Along with his two co-founders, Alexis founded Greenly, an app with a goal of encouraging behavioural change to reduce carbon emissions, turning the user’s phone into a personal carbon emissions tracker through their spending habits.
Alexis and his team believe that “the problem is that you cannot improve on something if you are not measuring it”.
Alexis and the team at Greenly recognize behavioural change is not the only lever that exists to reduce emissions, but it is certainly an important part of it. As Greenly sees it, governments and corporations are important players in the effort to reduce emissions – but they are themselves composed of individuals. Having every member of a team aligned with an individual emissions reduction strategy makes it more impactful. In order to create the most effective product, the Greenly team built a personal dashboard for individuals to easily understand their personal impact. By synchronizing the user’s dashboard with their bank account, the ‘personal version’ of the Greenly app analyses every purchase made, estimates the related carbon emissions, and suggests greener alternatives. In the app’s dashboard, users can measure their personal carbon footprint though their spending habits and track progress. Users are rewarded with ‘green cash back’ as they make progress by choosing greener alternatives. The ‘green cash back’ can be used to finance carbon avoidance projects, such as reforestation and renewable energies.
Founded in October 2019, Greenly has already experienced significant growth. In less than a year, they have brought 11 employees on board and reached more than two million users worldwide. And today, the financial sector is considered one of the biggest levers for the transition to renewable energy sources and what will be funded in the future. Greenly has recently partnered with financial institutions, resulting in a second product – the ‘bank version’ of the Greenly app. They designed an application programming interface (API) and a software development kit (SDK) especially for banks that allows them to offer carbon footprint measurements, personalised advice, and ethical cash back directly to customers. This way Greenly supports banks’ own commitments to reduce emissions, and each bank can support individual customers in their transition to ‘greener’ behaviours.
Cooperating with financial institutions allowed Alexis and his team to look at the broader landscape of who else is tracking their carbon footprint and found that 95 percent of legal entities in Europe are not keeping records related to emissions. As a result, Greenly launched its third product – the ‘company version’ of Greenly. This version is a business-to-business software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, specifically designed to automate the monitoring of a company’s carbon footprint and to encourage employees to track their emissions. Each of Greenly’s three products (personal, bank, and company versions of the software) now feed into one another: the consumer app encourages people to change their individual behaviours, companies can invite their employees to use the app, and businesses can refine their own emission estimates using the B2B software.
Greenly’s logic is simple: if the carbon emissions of consumption can be analysed, sustainable consumption can also be analysed to generate ‘carbon credits’ that can be used for rewards. Beyond the app, Greenly’s analytics engine looks at how money can play an important role in nudging us towards better habits. Alexis is particularly proud that Greenly has come up with a technology that can fulfil an urgent need and hopes that one day this need will be reflected with a new ‘environment’ category on the App Store or Google Play store.
The app economy provides tremendous business potential for small, independent companies. Greenly is a great example of how apps and platforms can innovate and create new solutions that empower consumers to take a more active role in driving change. We are proud to have Greenly as a member of the App Association, and we look forward to working with them to promote a in which app developers around the world can innovate and scale up. You can learn more about the Greenly app here and the app economy here.