Karsten Wenzlaff, Advisor
August 26th, 2025
Karsten Wenzlaff is a Crowdfunding and Fintech Expert from Germany. He is Secretary-General of Digit[...]
Category Archives: ESG, Financial Inclusion, Sustainable Finance
ESG report: Startups struggle on the E…but okay on the S and the G
Sifted | Freya Pratty | Mar 31, 2022
When it comes to ESG, startups are good on the S and the G; but struggle on the E.
Environmental, social and governance factors have gone from being a concern of specialist investors to a key part of mainstream investment strategy but, for all the talk, how are VC firms’ portfolio companies actually doing? Well — much better on the S and the G than the E, new research shows.
Better on diversity and mental health; bad on emissions and Startups struggle on net zero and emissions reduction
The average score for environmental metrics was 1.4 out of 4, compared to 2.6 for social and 2.7 for governance. In particular, startups showed strong progress on diversity and inclusion in the workplace and mental health provision. 57% of companies said they would provide diversity and inclusion training for their teams this year, and 58% said they have a mental health policy in place. Likewise, nearly 40% of businesses are looking to measure the gender pay gap.
See: Report: ESG Ratings and Data in Financial Services – Practitioners Perspective
The average performance of early-stage startups on environmental metrics is almost 50% lower than social and governance metrics. Just 7% of startups have a policy in place to achieve net zero carbon.
Fintech and SaaS score lowest on environmental metrics
There are some differences between sectors too. The research found that SaaS and fintech companies have struggled to adopt environmentally friendly practices at the rate of other industries. 65% of SaaS companies surveyed scored 1 out of 4 stars on environmental metrics. Ecommerce and manufacturing companies did well — scoring 3 stars on average.
Change has to come from investors as well as startups themselves, McCormick says. “It’s our responsibility as investors to take some of the burden away from startups that are struggling to know how get started,” she says.
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Download the 11 page PDF ESG report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Will this carbon footprint tracker be a game-changer for small businesses?
Protocol | Sarah Roach | Mar 17, 2022
Source: Veeterzy, Unsplash
Normative introduced a free version of its carbon emissions tracker for small to medium-sized businesses.
Tracking carbon emissions is hard, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. A Google-backed company is coming to their rescue, though.
Swedish startup Normative introduced a free version of its carbon emissions tracker, which it created to help relatively small companies get a baseline understanding of their emissions. That's the first step to putting together a climate plan.
“We want to make measuring carbon emissions and joining the race to net zero accessible to everyone,” Normative co-founder and CEO Kristian Rönn said in a statement. “This new tool is our second step towards engaging value chains across the world, and we will continue to develop and push our technology to help businesses take climate action.”
See: Canada’s Low-Carbon Tech opportunity is now or risk another familiar story
Normative’s Business Carbon Calculator helps small and medium-sized businesses monitor their carbon emissions and locate emission hotspots based on data like the size of their facilities and how much they spend on heating, electricity and gas. A team of fellows from Google.org, software engineers, UX designers and product managers have spent the past several months developing the calculator on a pro bono basis. Normative also offers larger businesses a paid product.
Smaller businesses can play a key role in the push to cut global emissions before 2030 and reach net zero emissions before 2050. Meeting those targets would help limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a key threshold for preserving a safe climate. Small and medium-sized enterprises make up about 90% of all enterprises and half of all jobs worldwide, according to the World Bank.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Geothermal Startup Plans to Dig World’s Deepest Hole to Unleash Boundless Energy
Vice | Becky Ferreira | Mar 9, 2022
The geothermal startup Quaise Energy has raised $63 million in funding to tap Earth’s deep subterranean power.
A company that plans to drill deeper into Earth than ever before, creating holes that would extend a record-shattering 12 miles under our planet’s surface, has raised a total of $63 million since its launch in 2020.
See: El Salvador taps renewable energy from volcanoes to start mining bitcoin
Most recently, Quaise Energy, a startup that aims to revolutionize the geothermal energy market, secured $40 million in series A funding in February, reports Axios. The goal of these super-deep holes is to access a limitless amount of renewable energy from the heat deep inside Earth.
"This funding round brings us closer to providing clean, renewable baseload energy," said Carlos Araque, CEO and co-founder of Quaise Energy, according to BusinessWire. "Our technology allows us to access energy anywhere in the world, at a scale far greater than wind and solar, enabling future generations to thrive in a world powered with abundant clean energy."
Geothermal energy has a low profile compared to other renewable energy sources such as solar, wind, and hydro, but Quaise believes it is “at the core of an energy-independent world,” according to the company’s website. This form of energy is among the oldest power sources harnessed by humans, but it only accounts for about 0.4 percent of net energy production in the United States, which is the world’s biggest geothermal producer.
See: While Sustainability Software Booms, Investors Demand Climate Data Proof
Quaise, which is a spinoff from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), intends to pioneer this technology using vacuum tubes known as gyrotrons that shoot millimeter-wave light beams, powered by electrons in a strong magnetic field. Using these devices, the company plans to burn almost twice as far into Earth as the deepest holes ever made, such as Russia’s Kola Superdeep Borehole or Qatar’s Al Shaheen oil well, both of which extend for about 7.5 miles.
Araque and his team at Quaise plan to funnel their seed money into prototype technologies within the next few years. By 2028, the company aspires to retrofit coal-fueled power plants into geothermal energy hotspots, reports ScienceAlert.
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Companies flooded Twitter on International Women’s Day. Then Gender Pay Gap Bot exposed the truth
Fortune | Sophie Mellor | Mar 9, 2022
Many corporations marked International Women’s Day on March 8 by tweeting photographs of woman colleagues alongside positive statements that celebrated the proud and equal work they do.
They did not mention this meant equal in everything but pay, however. But that omission was quickly fixed, at least in the U.K.
See: Worldwide gender gap has increased by a generation from 99.5 to 135.6 years
As U.K.-based organizations tweeted a flood of posts with platitudes celebrating their “sheroes,” a bot replied with the gender pay gap at each company in question.
The bot, @PayGapApp, which has over 75,000 followers, replied to every corporate tweet that used the hashtag #IWD2022 with a quote tweet highlighting the salary disparity between men and women in the company—a figure that is publicly available on the U.K. government website.
The U.K. government has required all companies with more than 250 employees to report their gender pay disparity since 2017. This has resulted in a public shaming of companies who virtue signal the immensely proud achievements women have done for them, but may not have been equally paid to do.
The bot reported the pay gaps of every company that made an International Women's day post, regardless of whether pay disparity was in favor of men, women, or equal.
See:
CVCA Report: Diversity improving but inclusion gap threatens progress
Ten things to know about gender equality
Bot creators Francesca Lawson and software developer Alastair Fensome told Fortune:
“What I get annoyed at with International Women’s Day and any awareness event that is linked to a social issue, so say Pride, Black History Month, it's all the same. Companies will show their support across all their comms and their social media, but they don’t provide any data or evidence to show what they are doing to challenge discrimination.”
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The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Happy International Women’s Day 2022!
NCFA Canada | FintechCanada.io | Sunny Shao | March 8 2022
Happy #InternationalWomensDay2022!
Here's a roundup of our top articles about #women:
• Women in #fintech & Covid-19 recovery https://t.co/i4a3LiVjQQ
• Why is VC still ignoring women? https://t.co/4sDl2ulQGd
• Why regulators should care about diversity https://t.co/7Wkn4ugEqW
#iwd2022 #internationalwomensday #diversity
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Pomp: We Should Not Normalize Economic War On Innocent Civilians
Substack | Anthony Pompliano | Mar 1, 2022
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has led to a flurry of financial sanctions from the United States and their allies over the last week. These actions include cutting Russian banks off from SWIFT, seizing the assets of various Russian oligarchs, outlawing US citizens and companies from transacting with Russia’s central bank, and much more.
Sanctions are levied during times of conflict to apply pressure to the leadership of our adversaries, but they accomplish this goal by actually cutting the average citizen off from the global financial system. Nearly 150 million Russian citizens have watched their savings evaporate as the ruble is in a free fall, their stocks are inaccessible since the stock market was shut down due to high volatility, and they can not withdraw or spend majority of their money due to sanctions and self-imposed limits by the banks.
See: So what is financial exclusion in the era of Open Finance?
There was an interesting development in the last 48 hours that highlights one of the key differences between the legacy financial system and the new, digital financial system. Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine, Mykhailo Fedorov, asked major crypto exchanges on Sunday to block all Russian users from using their platforms, regardless of whether they were accused of participating in any crimes or not. This request was followed up on Monday with a similar request from the White House’s National Security Council and the Treasury Department to major crypto exchanges.
As of this writing, all major crypto exchanges have stated that they will not cut off the average Russian citizen from using their products to buy, sell, or store bitcoin and various other cryptocurrencies. The largest crypto exchange in the world, Binance, stated that they are “not going to unilaterally freeze millions of innocent users’ accounts.” The company spokesperson explained to CNBC that “Crypto is meant to provide greater financial freedom for people across the globe. To unilaterally decide to ban people’s access to their crypto would fly in the face of the reason why crypto exists.”
Kraken CEO Jesse Powell publicly stated that his platform “cannot freeze the accounts of our Russian clients without a legal requirement to do so.” He continued with this explanation:
See: How open finance ecosystems should generate value for everyone
“Our mission at [Kraken] is to bridge individual humans out of the legacy financial system and bring them into the world of crypto, where arbitrary lines on maps no longer matter, where they don’t have to worry about being caught in broad, indiscriminate wealth confiscation. Our mission is better served by focusing on individual needs above those of any government or political faction…Besides, if we were going to voluntarily freeze financial accounts of residents of countries unjustly attacking and provoking violence around the world, Step 1 would be to freeze all U.S. accounts. As a practical matter, that’s not really a viable business option for us.”
Ultimately, we are watching the divergence of two financial systems. The legacy infrastructure is built and run by a group of financial firms who are susceptible to the whims of their governments. The new infrastructure is built on open-source software that is run by no single individual or organization. The decentralized nature leads to a different outcome in these situations.
Continue to the full article --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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Report: ESG Ratings and Data in Financial Services – Practitioners Perspective
IRSG UK | Feb 21, 2022
ESG and sustainability are becoming increasingly central to investment decisions around the world. COP26 in particular provided a big boost to sustainable finance and the shift in capital toward sustainable activities. ESG ratings are a vital component of this capital re-allocation so both demand for and reliance on these products is only expected to grow. It is therefore crucial that market users and investors have confidence in ESG ratings when making investment decisions.
See: Canadian securities regulators publish guidance on ESG-related investment fund disclosure
However, with the ESG Ratings market still in its infancy and demand increasing at a rapid rate, it is unsurprising that significant challenges are emerging. These include transparency of methodology, ratings varying widely between different providers, clarity of purpose behind different products, availability of data disclosure, and potential conduct risks. As demand is set only to accelerate, it is paramount that these challenges are addressed to ensure the market is fit for purpose and can properly support market practitioners in assessing the risks and opportunities of potential ESG investments.
Continue to the full article --> here
Download the 47 page PDF report --> here
The National Crowdfunding & Fintech Association (NCFA Canada) is a financial innovation ecosystem that provides education, market intelligence, industry stewardship, networking and funding opportunities and services to thousands of community members and works closely with industry, government, partners and affiliates to create a vibrant and innovative fintech and funding industry in Canada. Decentralized and distributed, NCFA is engaged with global stakeholders and helps incubate projects and investment in fintech, alternative finance, crowdfunding, peer-to-peer finance, payments, digital assets and tokens, blockchain, cryptocurrency, regtech, and insurtech sectors. Join Canada's Fintech & Funding Community today FREE! Or become a contributing member and get perks. For more information, please visit: www.ncfacanada.org
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