Green FinTech Disruptor Creed Partners with Brainpool AI to Track Personal Carbon Footprint.

With Creed had to be built from the ground-up. While there was a long-term ambition to be a leader in the fintech space, the first objective was to validate the concept feasibility. Aside from the standard software development requirements in creating a new application, Creed had several other challenges needed to be overcome:

1. Secure access to customer transaction (purchase) data
2. Secure access to reliable data on the carbon footprint of various product and service categories, such as groceries, utilities, fuel and public transport
3. Use this data as input into a carbon calculator to generate personalized carbon footprints for users
4. Create a mechanism that automatically classifies transactions based on their category

Overcoming each of these challenges was critical to Creed’s core functionality and achieving its objective. Creed’s CEO Roshan George sought a partner with the experience in AI, machine learning and data engineering to take Creed from an idea to reality.

After aligning on the business objective, vision, and deliverables, the first step was for Brainpool to complete a scoping programme aimed at identifying the best solutions to the identified challenges, scoping the features and technical specifications for the Creed prototype and defining the development roadmap, resources and investment requirements. Key features of the solution developed by Brainpool include:

1. Creed web app: provides the front-end UI for users to login in and review their personalized profile and a back-end for data to be exchanged via API
2. Open Banking API: provides access to information on customer transactions
3. Carbon calculator: calculate users’ carbon profile based on their individual transactions
4. Machine learning: automatically classify transactions according to relevant categories to improve precision and scalability in the long-term

Key Benefits:

• Improve transparency and raise awareness of how our lifestyle choices and purchase patterns impact our personal carbon footprint.
• Recommendations to inform environmentally-friendly purchasing decisions.
• Provide an effortless way to keep track of your spend and emissions.

“Open Banking means apps like CREED are now possible, but we needed help to take the initial idea and make it into something that actually linked spending to carbon footprint. That’s where Brainpool.ai came in. We are a small, bootstrapped startup, so Brainpool.ai became our AI team, advised on how to approach the challenge, built the proof of concept and helped us take it to the next stage using real-world data.” - Roshan George, CREED founder and CEO.

CREED is a regulated FCA app that is now available via the Android and Apple app stores and enables users to link their spending data with the app. Creed is currently inviting beta customers to pilot the product and provide feedback that will guide future development and features. Creed already achieved 97% banking coverage and is compatible with some of the UK’s biggest banking and credit institutions.