Switzerland shall have become a globally leading hub for green digital finance by 2030, further empowering positive environmental and economic impact.
Committed and competent entrepreneurs are just as much needed as progressive, mission-driven corporates, and authorities that provide a secure and innovation-friendly framework.
From this perspective, Switzerland is on the right path.
At the 2023 Point Zero Forum (PZF) in Zurich, Switzerland announced the creation of a formal Green Fintech Network (GFN).
The 2024 PZF in July provided a perfect platform to take stock and strategise about the future and desired outcomes.
At the Singapore Fintech Festival in November 2024, Asian and global interested parties will be able to find out more.
Over the first year of its existence the GFN has greatly expanded and diversified its membership, solidified its structure and started working on its announced initiatives.
Switzerland now boasts arguably one of the most coherent ecosystems of green fintechs, affiliated financial institutions and academic partners worldwide, officially supported by the national regulator, the State Secretary for International Finance SIF.
As such, it has started to become an important pillar to assist in the green transition and make Switzerland a leading place for sustainable finance.
It is the prime go-to partner for contacts, support and expertise concerning technology-assisted aspects in the sustainable finance space.
GFN: a powerful network
The Green Fintech Network has grown from a small group of visionary sustainable finance leaders in 2023 to a vibrant network of over 50 members.
The key membership consists of startups of various stages, predominantly dedicated to data-gathering and data-analysis, but also in the area of tech-enabled retail and institutional investor assistance.
That is why GFN’s member base includes also numerous domestic and internationally leading incumbents, such as financial institutions and professional services firms (UBS, PostFinance, and EY), Switzerland’s exchange SIX Group, global data provider MSCI, and major academic institutions (University of Zurich, ZHAW, and IMD) which provide cutting-edge research, and build a pipeline for science-based spin-offs.
The full overview of GFN member directory can be found here. Important partnerships and collaborations were established over the year with key industry associations and networks in Switzerland, such as Swiss Sustainable Finance, SwissInsurtechHub, Sustainable Finance Geneva, and the Swiss Banking Association SBA.
Internationally, the engagement with Singapore (MAS, gprnt.ai) is seen of particular value, collaborations with further financial centres are being explored, too.
The road ahead: Swiss regulation and open data, EU regulation, tangible business cases, a maturing blockchain ecosystem
Regulatory developments in Switzerland: The regulator’s focus is on enhancing sustainability disclosures’ transparency and comparability.
Presently only targeting large firms, compulsory reporting requirements will increasingly include a larger set of firms.
Many SMEs are already required to collect sustainability information due to the trickle-down effect on the whole supply chains of larger firms.
Additionally, reporting frameworks are being developed beyond climate and will include nature and biodiversity, just as social aspects.
Switzerland aims to strengthen comparability through international platforms and open data, such as the Net Zero Data Public Utility (NZDPU).
This presents a great opportunity for Green Fintechs to build technology- and data-enabled tools and solutions, as the focus will be on making primary data broadly accessible, not locking data behind paywalls.
Many Swiss green fintechs thus offer data-driven and analytics solutions, benefitting from Switzerland’s world-leading academic institutions in disciplines like data science and AI.
Compliance with EU regulation: Switzerland is greatly affected by evolving EU regulation, as many Swiss corporates are active in the EU market or are suppliers to larger EU corporates that require ESG data for their own reporting.
This means the real number of Swiss companies that will have to collect and report sustainability data goes much beyond the 300 large companies, probably by a factor of 10.
However, many Swiss SMEs affected do not dispose of the required know-how.
There is tremendous scope for green fintechs to assist SMEs in their coming reporting tasks.
Tangible business cases: With the overall direction of the economic transition being clear, a vast space of business opportunities emerges, too.
Disclosures and compliance have been the early drivers of the need for green fintech solutions.
Now, immense investments are required for the renovation of building stock, industrial processes, agro-economy, and the technologies related sectors are leveraging.
New ways of capturing related data, generating real-time insights, monitoring, and ultimately financing will emerge, many strongly tech-enabled.
Therefore, some green fintech segments are reinventing and empowering the way the transition can be financed, whether institutionally or individually, whether with public or private money, connecting impact and return.
Blockchain: Switzerland has been a leader in the blockchain space for a while already and is home to some of the world’s most important blockchain foundations.
Initially much focused on and driven by cryptocurrencies, blockchain use cases meanwhile expanded significantly beyond the attempt to reinvent money, shifting toward utility and infrastructure-value-focused applications, particularly in distributed ledger technology. One key example is the tokenisation of real-world assets.
Going forward, increasingly traditional institutions are making use of DLT at the intersection with the greening of the financial system.
Immutable raw data can be certified and recorded on a blockchain, made auditable and comparable with proper meta information.
This is particularly important for carbon as well as emerging nature and biodiversity markets, to improve trust and transparency, and to reduce transaction, monitoring and compliance costs.
The Swiss Pavilion will be a part of the International Pavilions at the upcoming Singapore Fintech Festival.