Insights:

Finns use more cards than cash. Credit card bills get high attention every month. Banks work hard to calculate risk in corporate investments. High consumption brings environmental problems, as well as large transaction volumes. Cause/behaviour and effect/impact is fussy.

Purpose:

Inform and inspire people to make informed decisions and review behaviour in order to bring about change.

Intention:

1. What gets measured gets attention.

2. Follow the money.

3. Insights accelerate change.

4. Repetition is the mother of all learning.

Innovation:

Put asset management environmental risk analysis to work in consumers wallets. The Aland Index merges individual credit card behaviour with leading financial market risk analysis data and presents the result on your bill. All the cards in Finland issued by the bank are being replaced to drive both funding and understanding, based on the belief that change is driven by insight, accelerated by innovation and created together.

Card transactions are sent via the credit card company to the bank’s payment system. The system uses the Aland Index to calculate the environmental impact of each transaction. The monthly impact is presented with the bill, along with compensation alternatives, local, global or behavioural. Over time, it also presents statistics/comparisons.

Index innovation steps:

1. Identify, collect, validate ThomsonReuters and Sustainalytics data of + 4,000 companies worldwide. Analyse and match data with Alandsbanken’s/MasterCards industry/category classification.

2. Calculate carbon intensity: total CO2 emissions per EUR revenue. Calculate average ratio per industry to show total CO2 emitted per EUR spent in given industry.

3. Calculate the social cost of carbon based on energy taxation. Total CO2 emitted and the associated social cost (i.e. societal impact) per EUR spent equals step 2 multiplied by step 3.

The index is verified by KPMG. Index and calculator are live.

The first 15,000 cards are being implemented.

The bank has already decided to connect the index with all customers but the project also aims to scale for good.

The local ambition is to promote recognition, position the bank, create insight and stimulate change to improve the sea.

The global ambition is to invite other banks to implement the Aland Index. At the intersection of consumption behaviour, asset management risk analysis and environmental threats, the vehicle for communication/insight is created and, unfortunately, the relevance is high.

With over 8 billion cards on the market, and 12 months in a year, communication opportunities are substantial. “Asset” management takes on a new meaning.

Development: BalticSeaProject.org is funding innovative ideas(€130.000 2015).

Bio-sourced cards are replacing all plastic. The cards don’t communicate status, only cause. Aland Index provides actionable data.

Partners like Niklas Zennström (Skype) join to support. Stockholm School of Economics writes a case study on the project for academic use.

The Baltic Sea Project and its Aland Index pioneers the way we connect with the impact of our consumption and enables informed decisions to stimulate change.

On a small island in the Baltic Sea, a local bank has supported the families of farmers, sailors and fishermen for 100 years. Now with 90,000,000 people living around the sea and dumping a mix of toxins into it, oxygen levels are at a critically low level, and in parts it’s already dead. “If the sea dies, we die – in order to take care of the clients, the bank needs to take care of the sea”. In response to the bank’s brief, the Baltic Sea Project with index and bio-sourced credit cards was developed with the purpose of prompting change by engaging clients, fund innovations and enabling better informed decisions. Finland has the most credit cards, 1.7 PC and a high consumption, 3.5 x Earth’s production per year. With that said, the idea was to turn every swipe into an insight and a catalyst for change. Budget approx. €50.000