Gprnt platform to ease sustainability reporting

Businesses in Singapore can now use Gprnt, a sustainability reporting and data platform, to automatically retrieve their utilities data for free to generate basic sustainability metrics, including Scope 1 and 2 emissions.

The platform, spun out from the Monetary Authority of Singapore and part of the Global Finance and Technology Network (GFTN), secured $4.62m in seed funding from Ant International and MUFG Bank.

Gprnt aims to reduce the complexity and cost traditionally associated with sustainability reporting, thereby encouraging wider adoption, particularly among small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), and facilitating their access to green loans and sustainable supply chain opportunities. It is also designed with modularity for potential expansion into other markets.

At a media event, Gprnt executives showed how the platform integrates with the Government Technology Agency’s Myinfo business service. This allows companies to use their Corppass digital business identities to securely pull electricity, water and town gas consumption data directly from national agencies such as PUB and the Energy Market Authority.

Lionel Wong, executive director of Gprnt, noted the significance of this direct data access: “What we offer today is a baseline utility for any company in Singapore to generate its metrics and get started on sustainability. It’s also a landmark globally, because nowhere else will you see a nationwide utility that lets every business do this for free, automatically harnessing technology.”

Joseph Tey, founder and managing partner of early adopter Willowmore, an internet of things (IoT) security and access control technology provider, said Gprnt has made it easier to collect the company’s utilities data for sustainability reporting without the need to hire consultants or dedicated staff to do the job.

This reporting process would usually take days or even weeks with the help of consultants, said Simin Liu, Gprnt’s head of product, adding that Gprnt will allow businesses, even those without any knowledge of sustainability reporting, to get the task done within minutes.

Financial institutions see Gprnt’s role in administering sustainability linked loans where borrowers typically submit their utilities bills for manual verification. Mike Ng, group chief sustainability officer of OCBC, which has been working with Gprnt since its early days, said: “We always talk about the holy grail of getting easy access to trusted data to generate sustainability data with as little manual input or effort as possible, and at little cost. With Gprnt, we can now obtain credible, trusted data at the outset, without much manual intervention.”

The platform’s strategic investors also weighed in. Carrie Suen, vice-president and head of global affairs and strategic development at Ant International, whose company serves more than 100 million merchants worldwide, 90% of whom are micro businesses and SMEs, said data continues to be the “pain point” that hampers merchants from gaining better visibility into their sustainability efforts. “Gprnt is doing a huge favour for us by linking all this data together,” she said.

Colin Chen, head of sustainable finance at MUFG Bank, noted the importance of having access to sustainability data of SMEs which are often suppliers to larger corporations. “SMEs’ Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions eventually become Scope 3 for the corporates,” he said, adding that having access to government data sources drives confidence that the data is credible.

Sopnendu Mohanty, group CEO of GFTN, provided a broader vision, comparing Gprnt’s potential impact to what India’s Unified Payments Interface did to democratise digital payments and grow the financial technology industry (fintech) in the subcontinent.

“Gprnt is the first public infrastructure on which the future of green fintech and green industry is going to grow,” Mohanty said, adding: “With this public infrastructure where you have access to trusted data and an open platform, we will see a whole ecosystem being built on top of this infrastructure.”

While the initial launch focuses on Scope 1 and 2 emissions derived from utilities, Wong indicated future developments would extend to Scope 3 emissions and expand the value-added services available on Gprnt’s marketplace. He said the current offering is “not the end of the journey – it’s just the start and we need to build more”.

Also in the pipeline are benchmarking capabilities, allowing organisations to compare their sustainability efforts against their peers. However, meaningful insights will require a critical mass of users so that sufficient data can be aggregated across Gprnt’s user base.

“What we want to do over time is to de-identify and aggregate enough data so that we can play back to you as a benchmark freely. But it will be a journey and requires a high level of adoption,” Wong said.