: ENVIRONMENT
DO-ing the right th thing
The ‘Greta effect’ forced governments to listen up on climate change. Another Swedish activist is having the same impact on the financial system. Mathias Wikström, CEO and Co-founder of Doconomy, and Ruediger Vogt G+D’s Head of Payment 4.0, explain “If nature were a bank, they would have already rescued it” is a phrase coined by one of the great radical writers of Latin America, Eduardo Galeano and later appropriated (albeit slightly altered) by US politician Bernie Sanders.
Mathias Wikström, CEO and co-founder of Swedish B2B Doconomy, reaches for it now to illustrate the pressing need for action to tackle climate change, drawing a parallel between the urgent measures brought in by governments to rescue the financial system in 2008, and the comparable inertia in dealing with the environmental catastrophe that is on our
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collective doorsteps today. That means it falls to each of us, on an individual level, he believes, to effect change. Fully launched in 2019 – the same year that the best-known climate activist of modern times, a then 15-year-old Greta Thunberg, addressed the United Nations Climate Change Conference – Doconomy set out to help her fellow Swedes be the change she wanted to see by reducing and/or offsetting their carbon footprint through the spending choices they make. A ‘tool, an ecosystem and a constantly evolving platform’, Doconomy has since influenced millions of people across the world through the vector of banks and other institutions as it attempts to bring
about structural change to the financial system, as Wikström explains. “Our ambition is to enable a sustainable lifestyle for all, because we think, at the core, most people want to do good, but there just aren’t sufficient tools to assist them in driving the change of behaviour that we see is needed. Our job is to provide those tools. We have two core services; one that calculates the environmental footprint of every transaction, and one that calculates the cradle-to-gate footprint of a product.” Doconomy’s mission is to take people and banks outside of their comfort zone, and challenge the way things have always been done. “It’s important that is done in a credible and a trustworthy fashion,” adds Wikström.
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