Protecting our planet 🌍

We’re all facing the challenges of climate change, and it is up to each one of us to protect our communities and help our planet recover.

At Swan, as we develop the banking features that power apps throughout Europe, we understand that our services are far-reaching. This makes it especially important to take sustainability seriously. So, we keep a close eye on Swan’s environmental footprint. But we also care about the impact of our partners—the companies integrating banking features via Swan. Given their global reach and daily influence, it's crucial that we work collectively to minimize our environmental impact as much as possible.

Measuring our carbon footprint

Because Swan’s services are purely digital, with no physical bank branches, we make a lot less emissions from buildings and facilities than other types of businesses. But we can’t deny that our day-to-day operations still contribute to climate change. That’s why Swan has teamed up with Magelan, to help us measure and report our carbon footprint in line with government and industry standards, as well as establish strategies to reduce our impact across all of our activities.

Swan measures its carbon footprint across all three standardized scopes:

Scope 1: Direct emissions
This includes emissions from business activities. If you build cars, this would include all emissions from your factory. Swan doesn’t directly pollute, so we don’t have direct emissions.

Scope 2: Indirect emissions
This scope covers the energy you can purchase, such as electricity. This indeed comes into play at Swan.

Scope 3: Emissions from the entire value chain
Covering emissions generated by hired 3rd parties. For example, servers at Amazon, freelancers, and lawyers hired for regulatory purposes. These emissions add up!

Emissions calculation breakdown

Here’s what came into play during our calculations:

🛒 The procurement of goods and services

We looked at the total range of goods and services procured by Swan, whether intellectual, digital, or even physical. Think external freelancers, consultants, or lawyers hired to assist the company and its product development. All software Swanees use in their daily work such as Figma, Snowflake, Google Ads, Hubspot, Forest Admin. Diverse banking and insurance services are also included. Finally, we take into account all physical goods purchased for our offices across Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, and Milan. Coffee, cookies, fruit, and nuts — all the things that make Swanees happy!

💻 IT equipment (lifetime and usage)

This category encompasses all emissions produced during the manufacturing and use of IT equipment employed by Swanees. We consider any computer, screen, printer, television, or other IT device used by a Swanee for professional purposes.

📀 Emissions originating from our data server activities

Swan is a banking-as-a-service provider, and our software requires significant data processing and storage capabilities. This includes secure and reliable data servers to store client accounts’ information and efficient servers to process large volumes of transactions across various payment methods. Our data server providers, AWS and Snowflake, are responsible for the manufacturing and management of these servers. However, the production and operation of these servers generate substantial carbon emissions.

🏢 Emissions originating from the construction and usage of the office spaces (electricity, gas, and waste)

This category includes emissions originating from Swan's offices, such as electricity and gas consumption, waste, and even the amortized emissions from the construction of our office building.

🚄 Business travel emissions (transportation, hotels, etc.)

Swanees travel to expand into new markets, attend fintech conferences, and build relations across Europe. We strongly insist on taking the train whenever possible. For example, Swanees traveling between Paris and Barcelona exclusively take the train. We’re quite proud of this, as it’s more common otherwise to fly between those cities. While we’d love to ban flights entirely, it’s not easy and exceptions are sometimes made. So, for this category, we took an honest look at the impact of all of Swan’s travel choices.

🥡 Emissions stemming from employees’ daily habits and consumption during work hours

Swanees daily activities create greenhouse gas emissions during work hours. We took into account commutes to and from work, as well as food eaten.

Swan’s Carbon Footprint - 2023

Purchase of services (425 tCO2e)

Employee meals (66 tCO2e)

IT (58 tCO2e)

Employee commuting (37 tCO2e)

Offices (construction and energy-use) (34 tCO2e)

Business travel (22 tCO2e)

‍

Concrete actions to reduce our carbon footprint

It's important to focus on actions that will make the most significant impact on reducing Swan’s carbon footprint.

Here’s what we have committed to:

📏 Measure the financed emissions related to the BNP bank account more precisely

🤝 Ask our main service providers for their carbon footprint

🤖 Introduce a connected fridge solution to our headquarters, offering mainly vegetarian options

🥦 Provide all-vegetarian options at internal Swan events

☁️ Research cloud location options that could help minimize our carbon footprint

🚄 Promote train travel with additional days off or financial incentives (Even our CEO does Paris<>Berlin by train)

👭 Organize climate awareness workshops for our teams.

Swan’s "Environment & Sustainability" Employee Resource Group is setting up "train the trainer" sessions with 2tonnes, ensuring that all Swanees receive interactive, action-oriented sustainability training.

‍

It’s not easy being green — but it’s certainly worth it!

Making sustainable choices can be challenging both financially and logistically. It can mean a change in your day-to-day routine. We don’t believe this process is going to be seamless. It’s hard to change habits, but we have no choice.

Interested in joining a dedicated team that balances ambition with sustainable practices? We're looking for more like-minded Swanees to join our team!

Check out our open positions —we'd love to meet you and work together to make Swan a leader in sustainable practices at work. 🌍✨

‍

Annexe.
Recognizing the limitations of our carbon footprint report

While developing this carbon footprint report we encountered certain limitations and areas of improvement for future reports. In multiple instances, we had to estimate our emissions with proxy calculations supported by benchmark metrics (statistical metrics of the ADEME and other relevant organizations). Additionally, we were unable to report detailed information of the emissions generated by the placement and credit provision done with our customer’s funds in our safeguarding accounts; hence we estimated our estimations with the Rift x Magelan methodology.

To improve the accuracy, we would benefit from more detailed and reliable emission reporting from our providers and diverse partners. This collective effort involves the entire value chain of our industry. By working together, we can ensure that the data we use is precise and comprehensive, ultimately leading to more effective strategies for reducing our carbon footprint. Collaboration and transparency will be key!

Nonetheless, the accuracy of our report, as any other company’s carbon footprint report, should not be an obstacle for Swan to engage in decisive carbon-reducing action plans for this year. 💪

‍