November 2021

Fintech Week took place in Hamburg from November 22 to 26, 2021. CRIF was there as event host and organizer of the event: "Sustainable Finance & ESG - Four presentations for more sustainability".

From blockchain to capital markets, and social investment to live podcasts on a cashless society, as well as networking dinners and discussion panels on open banking and sustainable finance: 23 events took place under the umbrella of the fifth Fintech Week.

Participants from Germany and abroad, speakers from banks and FinTech companies, and guests from different areas of the financial world came together in Hamburg to discuss news and trends in the digitalization of finance. New companies introduced themselves, and there were discussions between established market participants and newcomers.

The fact that the event was the first event to be fully booked shows that CRIF had chosen the right topic.

After the introduction and welcome by Kerstin Valet (Head of Marketing & Communications, CRIF), Gösta Jamin started his presentation on ESG in SMEs. Gösta Jamin is Professor of Finance and Banking at the University of Applied Sciences Ludwigshafen and Co-Founder of the credit rating platform BankenScore. He supports companies and financial service providers in ESG transformation.

This speech was followed by the second talk by Jurij Peters. Jurij Peters is Co-Founder and Managing Director of eco.income engineering. He has a great passion for systemic climate innovation, which led to the foundation of the climate FinTech startup eco.income. In his presentation, he introduced how his company eco.income has developed a scientific method to calculate greenhouse gas emissions based on categorized payment transactions, for 40+ countries. With this, the startup is building a Climate Action Platform that helps banks and other financial service providers to offer a payment-based feature in digital banking to easily track, better understand and ultimately reduce their personal climate footprint.

To finish off, Florian Mahler’s presentation was also very interesting. Florian Mahler is Senior B2B Product Manager at CRIF GmbH and in this position he is in charge of CRIF's ESG platform. He presented the new ESG platform and showed a really interesting demo of the portal. With CRIF ESG, a portal for the assessment of companies according to ESG (environmental, social, and governance) criteria has been developed. Companies can now access the portal for free to record their own ESG efforts, find out about the sustainability of all their suppliers and business partners, and have the collected data certified by an independent body. The solution is a transparent and simple way to support companies in communicating their contribution to ESG goals.