Fintech is increasingly gaining momentum as a driver of social and environmental
change. When it comes to helping individuals understand their impacts, personal
carbon/impact tracking is now a feature on several European banking
apps
and a growing array of offerings from companies such as
Doconomy and
Aspiration.
Another new tool in the kit is ImpactKarma’s Karma
Wallet — a self-described ‘Mint of impact
spending’ that is aiming to reduce the consumer quandary around individual
climate action with a free spending-habit platform empowering users to identify
brands with responsible business
practices, understand the carbon footprint of their spending, and offer
opportunities to offset that footprint through a partner
organization. Users simply sign up, link a card, and start
shopping impact-driven brands to boost their Karma Score — essentially a
credit score for personal spending impact.
Karma Wallet is banking on the marriage of behavior change, fintech and systems
change to create a critical mass of consumers able to turn intent into action
and pressure corporations to make the broader changes the world needs.
“There is a big gap between intention and action,” ImpactKarma CEO and
co-founder Jayant
Khadilkar told
Sustainable Brands™. “A lot of us want to spend on conscious
companies, but we don’t do it; and it’s because we don’t have the tools to do
it. What we’ve created is a bridge between intention and action, to help
consumers move from thinking about doing good to actually doing good.”
Corporate sustainability communications are still too often marred by
misinformation and
greenwashing,
increasing public skepticism; so, brand marketing is an unreliable tool for
making informed choices. On the other hand, wading through the oceans of
available information is unrealistic for most shoppers. Karma Wallet draws
company data from over 30 independent sources
— which it then maps to a corresponding target in 16 of the UN
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and aggregated
social and environmental impact. If a company meets a threshold of targets,
Karma Wallet indicates the company is making a positive impact.
The best change, Khadilkar says, is when a consumer shifts to purchasing from
better brands — thus fostering systems change through grassroots purchasing
activism.
ImpactKarma is poised to launch a vertically integrated one-stop shop for
understanding, quantifying and taking action on the impact of personal spending.
But placing the responsibility to act on individuals alone is only one piece of
the puzzle: Systems
change
is what is truly needed.
Creating a movement
ImpactKarma seeks to harness the power of behavior change at a massive scale to
influence the institutions most responsible for steering the global economy
toward a sustainable future.
“We are helping consumers change their habits — and with that, demonstrate to
corporations that people are moving away from them in order to buy from someone
more sustainable,” Khadilkar explains. “We are creating a movement that will put
pressure on the corporations.”
Companies take cues from two external sources, Khadilkar said. Investors are on
the one side, demanding responsible corporate action. On the other is an eager
but largely unengaged consumer base, with little more to go on than unreliable
brand marketing. Khadilkar endeavors to put Karma Wallet in enough people’s
pockets to continue driving brands toward systems change.
Soon, ImpactKarma will show customers alternatives to brands with
less-than-stellar ratings, giving them leverage. With cashback, discounts, etc,
the platform will further incentivize customers to change their spending habits
in support of good actors, using aggregated consumer spending data to nudge
companies in the right direction.
For now, ImpactKarma is building user acquisition and establishing itself as a
trusted player in consumer education and action. In the short term, it is
focused on providing cashback rewards for shopping sustainable businesses — a
feature Khadilkar expects to roll out later this month.
If a company scores high enough on Karma Wallet, users can select the merchants’
provided cashback reward, shop, and have cash automatically deposited into the
user’s Karma Wallet account — where it can be pocketed or applied towards other
planet-positive projects, such as carbon
capture.
Behavior change: Can it work?
Karma Wallet is a bridge between individual behavioral change and systems change
— two complementary, and
necessary,
aspects of effective climate action. According to Khadilkar, this dual approach
appears to be working: An internal ImpactKarma survey discovered that 94 percent
of surveyed users felt Karma Wallet influenced their purchasing decisions, and
87 percent would recommend the platform to others.
ImpactKarma has noted 60 percent of its users boosting their Karma Score, which
suggests the platform is playing a role in helping consumers find agency.
“We’ve seen a steady trend in increase [in Karma score],” Khadilkar said. “What
that means is that people are spending more on good companies, and less on
not-so-good companies.”
ImpactKarma sees itself in a unique position to effect scalable behavior change
due to its portability across financial systems and its vertically integrated
approach to social and environmental scoring, combined with time-proven
incentives such as cashback rewards.
“There is a trend of individuals shifting to more sustainable
banks,”
Khadilkar said. “We can provide the mechanism to banks so that they can attract
a younger population.”
Karma Wallet could also be used as a reporting tool, he said — with banks,
employers and other institutions able to use aggregated stakeholder impact
scores to quantify how its customers and employees are making an impact.
More conscientious shoppers want to align with employers and institutions that
walk their sustainability talk, and Karma Wallet could be a useful tool for this
cohort to demystify the process of shopping their values.
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Christian is a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and outdoor junkie obsessed with the intersectionality between people and planet. He partners with brands and organizations with social and environmental impact at their core, assisting them in telling stories that change the world.
Published Sep 12, 2022 8am EDT / 5am PDT / 1pm BST / 2pm CEST