Starting next year, all public and private companies with annual revenues of at least $1 billion in Singapore are required to make climate-related disclosures. This may be a challenge to many organisations as sustainability reporting is still nascent.
“Organisations are grappling with [various levels of challenges when it comes to sustainability reporting such as] calculating their carbon emissions, reporting it in a credible way that meets the right standards, and getting actionable insights to achieve their green/sustainability KPIs,” says Gabriel Wong, chief commercial adviser and co-founder of Metaverse Green Exchange (MVGX), a Singapore-based green fintech group.
Recognising those pain points, MVGX Tech, a subsidiary of MVGX, offers carbon software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions that empower organisations to take action at every stage of their decarbonisation journeys. Consolidated under the Carbon Connect Suite, MVGX Tech’s products, services and software focus on carbon measurement, reporting and verification, as well as decarbonisation rating, carbon credit development and issuance, carbon credit listing and registry, and carbon credit trading.
Emissions database is ‘crown jewel’
MVGX Tech’s extensive emissions database, states Wong, is the company’s “crown jewel” and differentiating factor.
“Calculating carbon emissions involves multiplying your emission activity data with the emissions factor. It sounds simple but the challenge is getting that emissions factor correct,” Wong tells DigitalEdge. An emissions factor is a representative value that describes the rate at which a given activity releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
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He adds: “Our database has both primary and secondary emissions data, which can be used to find the right emissions factor. This is crucial for calculating Scope 3 emissions, especially if your supply chain partners are unable or unwilling to tell you their emissions figures.”
Take for example, an automobile company in Germany looking for the carbon emissions of its paint manufacturer in Japan. Even if the paint supplier is unable to provide its primary emissions data, MVGX Tech can give the German automobile company a “high confidence level proxy emissions data” of the paint supplier. That information will be based on the emissions data of other paint manufacturers in MVGX Tech’s database with the same profile, such as having facilities in the same area as that Japanese paint supplier and exporting to automobile companies in Germany.
“You can’t do such estimations if you don’t have a large database of primary and secondary emissions data,” claims Wong.
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Besides having inputs from real operation emission activities and raw materials, MVGX Tech is also enriching its database by working with certification bodies that have opened their databases.
Enabled by cloud
The cloud has been a key enabler for MVGX Tech, helping the company with its go-to-market strategy and making it easy to deploy its solutions.
All our modules/solutions are completely on the cloud and they are plug-and-play. We’re mindful that the decarbonisation journey is daunting, so [we’ve designed our solutions to be] simple to deploy, subscribe to and use.
Gabriel Wong, chief commercial adviser and co-founder, Metaverse Green Exchange
MVGX Tech first started its cloud journey with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2019, but later decided to also tap Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) for “more support and security to address business continuity requirements”.
“OCI is key to our business. We see ourselves as a data company that helps organisations measure, process, report data and even provide high confidence level proxy data [as necessary]. OCI enables us to do those and scale effectively by providing reliable cloud infrastructure,” says Wong, before adding that the company has decreased its operational cost by 22% after moving the same workloads from AWS to OCI.
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MVGX also uses cloud-based Oracle NetSuite to automate its financial processes, supporting its green innovation and sustainability efforts. “Moving from a manual financial management system, NetSuite helps consolidate our financials in an easy-to-read format which is especially important as we continue to grow our business. With NetSuite, we have managed to reduce our monthly reporting by nearly 50%,” claims Wong.
Meeting the needs of green fintech companies
“Sustainability reporting is particularly complicated as it involves disclosure of data that occurs in an organisation’s supply chain and customer base. As sustainability data is sourced from across the organisation, a single clean source of data is needed for accurate reporting,” Chin Ying Loong, regional managing director for Asean and Sage (South Asian Growing Economies) at Oracle, shares with DigitalEdge in a separate interview.
He continues: “OCI and its built-in AI technologies are well-placed to support green organisations by providing transparency to all stakeholders and regulators, as well as managing the complexities of their sustainability offerings. They streamline insight extraction and analysis [for green fintech companies like MVGX Tech], leading to faster, error-free decision-making and improved efficiency, ultimately enhancing the customer experience.”
OCI, he adds, provides the highest levels of security, performance and value to enable green fintech companies to meet data residency and security requirements.
Moreover, organisations “gain enormous economies of scale with OCI”, especially when it comes to carbon and energy consumption. This is because 100% renewable energy is used at 94 of Oracle’s data centres as it works towards net-zero emissions by 2050.
To enable more accurate sustainability reporting, Oracle has developed an ESG reporting and planning solution that is built on Oracle Fusion Cloud Enterprise Performance Management. It allows customers to collect and standardise ESG data from multiple sources and manage all their ESG data in one place.
By having a dedicated ESG reporting platform, green fintech companies can leverage and integrate these applications and solutions into their own technology stacks to extract ESG-specific data.
Chin Ying Loong, regional managing director for Asean and Sage , Oracle
Backed by a reliable IT infrastructure, MVGX Tech plans to expand its presence in Asean to help more companies further their decarbonisation journeys. It plans to enter the Thailand and Philippines markets this year, while continuing to serve customers in Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, China and Taiwan directly and through its channel partners.
MVGX Tech’s SaaS modules are also offered in NetSuite. This makes it easy for NetSuite customers to subscribe and use the modules for sustainability reporting, which in turn drives customer acquisition for MVGX Tech.
