Singapore looks to drive green fintech development with Google Cloud partnership
Singapore wants to drive the development of climate fintech products and services through a new initiative jointly launched with Google Cloud. The scheme aims to shortlist 100 applications which will then be developed and tested on the cloud provider’s open source platform
Called the Point Carbon Zero Programme, the initiative is parked under the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s (MAS) Project Greenprint and uses climate fintech services to increase the sector’s access to “accurate and granular” climate-related data. This in turn will provide energy for more efficient use of capital for green and sustainable projects, according to MAS.
The industry regulator said in a joint statement on Tuesday that Google would offer its open source cloud platform, which was dedicated to facilitating the development of climate finance, to support the development and use of fintech applications.
Fintech accounted for more than half of the world’s startup investment, but climate fintech remained a nascent sub-segment, MAS noted. It added that the new initiative aimed to drive the expected growth of such applications in Asia over the next three years.
The program will shortlist 100 applications for further development based on their potential to facilitate capital flows towards green and sustainable projects in the region. Applicants’ submissions should address a range of climate finance problem statements, MAS said.
Selected applications will have the opportunity to deploy their solutions on Google’s open source cloud platform in Singapore. The climate fintech applications will then be tested by a community of 1,000 financial institutions.
MAS said its program also aimed to help 10,000 multinationals and SMEs establish and track their sustainability goals.
In addition, the new initiative will offer selected applicants mentorship and funding from Google, as well as access to aggregated climate disclosure, environmental and public data from Project Greenprint. Taken from more than 200 public datasets across various sectors and hosted on Google Cloud, the data can be used to improve the accuracy of climate fintech applications to measure carbon emissions and the impact of an organization’s efforts to reduce them.
Applicants on the list will also be able to access Google Cloud’s Carbon Sense services to track their own carbon footprint associated with their cloud usage. New climate-related data sets curated from these new applications may be made available, subject to data owner consent, to Project Greenprint’s partners. MAS said this would be in line with its aim to facilitate “reliable and efficient” flows of quality sustainability data that supported financial institutions’ sustainable finance and investment decisions.
MAS Chief Sustainability Officer Darian McBain said: “Singapore’s financial and FinTech sectors can play a central role in effectively channeling private capital towards sustainable projects and businesses that focus on their long-term sustainability impact. Effective use of technology allows us to greatly improve the quality , the availability and comparability of the ESG data necessary to facilitate these financial flows [and] accelerate our transition to a low-carbon economy.”
According to Google Cloud country director for Singapore and Malaysia, Sherie Ng, ESG initiatives were a priority for most global organizations, but less than 2 in 10 of these firms were currently able to measure and optimize their efforts.
Through the Point Carbon Zero program, Ng added that Google hoped to drive green economic data flows and enable countries as well as organizations to take quantifiable steps forward towards a carbon-free future.
Singapore has a 10-year roadmap to drive sustainable development and reach the goal of net zero emissions as soon as possible. Its Green Plan 2030 outlines various goals across different areas, including plans to deploy enough solar energy to power 350,000 households a year, cut waste sent to landfill by 30%, and have at least 20% of schools be carbon neutral .
Singapore said early this year that it would only allow new data centers that demonstrated high resource efficiency to be built in the city-state. The announcement came after it temporarily halted the construction of such facilities while it reviewed how data center growth could be managed in a “sustainable way” that was consistent with the country’s climate commitments.
