6 FinTech’s making the world a better place

I’ve written a lot recently about how technology can make the world a better place (read Digital for Good if you want to know more). It sounds esoteric but there are concrete examples from Alipay’s Ant Forest to Alandsbanken’s Baltic sea card, Green Finance is becoming a thing.

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Ando Money

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I find it interesting that on their home page, they have purpose as one of the key banner links. What’s their purpose? “For decades, banks have funded fossil fuels without their customers’ knowledge or consent. It’s time your bank levelled with you. At Ando, we’re not just solving climate change, we’re changing banking for good. We believe the industry should be transparent—fact forward, value based, and authentically accessible—with the hope that other financial institutions will follow.”

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Rebalance Earth

Rebalance Earth is a global platform for valuing and funding a nature to combat climate change, protect biodiversity and lift communities out of poverty. The idea is to offer businesses a way to “employ” the ecosystem services provided by species such as forest elephants, to produce carbon offsets, enrich the biodiversity and support the livelihood of local communities. They do this by using blockchain technology to safely transfer funding into projects that support UN Sustainable Development Goals. The funding is underpinned by verified data that confirms the continued protection of known individuals of key species.

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Floodflash

Floodflash is an InsurTech who use smart sensors to remove the uncertainty, cost and time of traditional insurance. You basically set a request for insurance cover if your property is affected by flooding – you determine the height risk of the waters – and the company pays out immediately if their sensor tells the company that you’ve experienced a flood at that risk level or higher. The sensors are installed by their qualified engineers, and that’s it. You’re all set.

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rePurpose Global

Inspired by the carbon credit market, rePurpose Global is a plastic credit platform. Like being carbon neutral, rePurpose enables individuals and businesses to become plastic neutral and take responsibility for their plastic footprint by funding recycling of the same amount of plastic waste they produce. rePurpose funds plastic recovery projects across many countries and works with companies and organisations like Nestlé, the World Wildlife Fund and the World Bank to create an international plastic offset standard.

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Betterview

Another InsurTech aimed at the catastrophe insurance area, such that claims teams can assess damage fast and deal with customer issues as quickly as possible. Their platform uses analytics to allow insurers to predict and prevent catastrophic damage. As they put it: “The Betterview platform helps transform insurance companies from repair and replace to predict and prevent, optimizing underwriting and inspections, improving loss ratios, and saving homes and businesses. Get the property insights and workflow tools to accelerate decisions and improve risk at every point of the policy lifecycle.”

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CAPE Analytics

Like Betterview, CAPE Analytics uses tech to predict and prevent risks using artificial intelligence (AI). As they put it: “CAPE Analytics uses deep learning and geospatial imagery to provide instant property intelligence for buildings across the United States. CAPE enables insurers and other property stakeholders to access valuable property attributes at time of underwriting—with the accuracy and detail that traditionally required an on-site inspection, but with the speed and coverage of property record pre-fill.” The company supports insurance providers like AXA and Western Mutual to optimise their underwriting process by helping providers underwriters use computer vision and aerial imagery to evaluate properties, without sending someone out to physically inspect them.

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I’m sure there are many more. If you are one of them, let me know.

This article first appeared on Chris Skinner's blog, read that and many more here