Aiming higher: 5 lessons learned from Qonto’s 2023 carbon reporting

Sustainability at Qonto: we’re making progress — and now we’re setting our sights even higher.

Last year, we set out our sustainability pledge: to achieve a 5% yearly reduction across all types of carbon emissions, direct and indirect, relative to Qonto’s company growth. This target does not include our financed emissions, which we are in the process of assessing.

And now, our 2023 carbon report is in: we met — and overachieved on — this goal 🎉.

But, while we’re pleased to see our progress, it’s galvanized us to set a new, more ambitious goal: reducing our carbon emissions by 10%, relative to our growth. And, along with our new aim, 2023’s reporting process has given us some valuable learnings. Things we would do differently next time; lessons that we’ll use to do better as we continue on our Impact journey.

These lessons have come directly from our own experience, but we hope that they’ll also serve as useful guidance to other companies looking to reduce their negative footprint and increase the positive mark they leave on the planet.

Read more: Championing people, protecting the environment: Qonto’s pledge to take action

Lesson 1: more assessment knowledge = better results accuracy

In 2022’s reporting we initially looked mainly at monetary-based measurement — i.e. the theoretical amount of carbon linked to a specific amount spent. But it proved, in places, to leave us with more assumptions than certainties.

So, in 2023’s reporting, wherever possible, we used activity-based measurement first, rather than monetary-based, for more accurate results. This means we calculated the precise — and tangible — amount of carbon created by a specific activity (such as a flight taken) rather than looking at the assumed amount of carbon emitted from a specific cost.

We also used another new methodology for our 2023 assessment — the GHG Protocol. This methodology is international instead of French; the format that’s recognized by international authorities. This reflects the European scope of our business and makes the report easier to communicate across markets.

This improved understanding of our CO₂e emissions enabled us to fine-tune our reduction target for 2024, and will give us a more accurate read on our reporting going forward. Good news all around!

Lesson 2: colleague awareness and commitment drives change

Your colleagues are one of your biggest assets — including when it comes to championing more environmentally friendly ways of working.

Our Qontoers showed this in action. We first involved them in the conversation by launching new, dedicated Onboarding sessions for all new starters, launching interactive, awareness-driving climate workshops, and creating our own internal Impact Representative community. These Impact Representatives are a dedicated group of Qontoers investing 10% of their work time into driving forward our sustainability & inclusivity initiatives.

This fostered new, more sustainable policies at a company level, and encouraged proactivity in suggesting, testing, and implementing actions within teams. Ably assisted by Qonto’s ESG specialist team, they launched a new environmental hackathon during Earth Week, which was open to all Qontoers. This invited lots of home-grown suggestions for how we can be more sustainable at Qonto, many of which we’re now seeking to roll out.

As Qonto’s Legal Environmental Social & Governance expert, Léa Farnier, says, “Your colleagues are those who understand your business — and how it works — best. Inspiration around doing things in a more sustainable way can and should come from everywhere. A prime example of this is that, following Qonto’s first Earth Week Challenge, we’re now investigating numerous Qontoer-proposed initiatives. Just one of those is introducing reusable glass containers that can be used when colleagues collect their lunch at local food establishments, to reduce plastic waste.”

Lesson 3: sometimes it helps to call for external support

When it comes to stepping outside of your direct area of expertise, finding the right partners is paramount.

We’re lucky to have our talented in-house ESG team, but to take on the significant task of reporting — and ensure total impartiality in the results — we called in the external experts, too.

For us, this meant creating a hand-picked selection box of support. Consultants and assessment tool providers usually have the right expertise on part of our scope, but not a complete knowledge to support with all carbon footprint calculations.

“As Léa says, “In our case, Greenly was a good fit for our general assessment because it allowed us to realize step by step a GHG inventory for scope 1, 2, and 3 in accordance with the GHG Protocol. Greenly enables starting with the activity-based data approach as much as possible and incorporates in a second layer the spend based approach via a technology for recognizing and distributing carbon impact. After getting a complete picture of our operational impact, we called for a specialized team to investigate Qonto and our clients’ funds’ investments. So we selected Carbon4 Finance as our climate data provider. They had the industry knowledge we needed to investigate the investment of Qonto and our clients’ funds. Thanks to their data we could assess whether and how the money put in our banking partners’ accounts and invested contributes to a low-carbon economy. The final goal for us now is to be able to target investments that emit less carbon while ensuring the same level of profitability.”

Lesson 4: sustainability is a networked effort

While Qonto is a branchless, digital service — meaning that we avoid the traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ emissions — our 2023 reporting revealed that a large proportion of our emissions are linked to our supply chain and partners. That covers everything from the carbon emissions generated by Cloud storage and digital adverts to the waste generated in their operations. So, naturally, we saw that we needed to engage with those in our network to stimulate positive change.

That’s why we’re working with EcoVadis to assess the Environmental, Social & Governance (ESG) performance of our key suppliers and help them to improve their performance where needed.

Driving this change isn’t a quick fix, but we’re already engaging with our providers and encouraging them to put in place relevant actions to reduce their (and ultimately also our) emissions.

“We’re encouraging our main suppliers to pursue more sustainable ways of working, by introducing measures such as ESG assessments for those representing 50% of our spend in 2024, engaging with the main GHG contributors and suppliers not meeting Qonto’s acceptability thresholds to assist them in improving their impact, and adding specific ESG clauses into new contracts,” shares Alexia Delahousse, VP Legal & Public Affairs, Impact Sponsor.

Lesson 5: identifying levers to improve our marketing sustainability isn’t always straightforward — but we all want to make it happen

Often, putting in place actions to reduce our emissions in marketing means decreasing our performance, making it tricky to find the right trade-off. That’s where operating a ‘test-and-learn’ approach comes into play.

Our media agency, Dentsu, supported us in running specific additional analysis on our investments and identifying possible improvements for the future (e.g. technical solutions to reduce the impact of file weights, favoring shorter content formats, finding “affinity audiences” for improved advertising targeting, and sourcing solutions to reduce emissions linked to programmatic buying).

And, when developing and running brand campaigns, we’re looking to choose agencies with more sustainable principles and practices, and challenging our different providers to come up with their best alternative scenarios — both for production and media.

A look to 2024 and beyond

We’re proud of our progress, but we’ve got further to go.

Given our strong 2023 results, we can see that our ambitions should be higher. So we’re raising them for 2024 — aiming at achieving a 10% yearly reduction across all types of carbon emissions (direct and indirect), relative to our company growth. As was the case in 2023’s target, this does not include our financed emissions, which we are still in the process of assessing.

In parallel, we will work on a long-term greenhouse gas (GHG) trajectory for Qonto — aligned with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 1.5°C global warming scenario. We’ll develop an associated decarbonization plan, as set out by the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD).

It’s a long road to becoming as sustainable as we’d like to be, but equipped with the learnings above, we’ll get there quicker, and more effectively.

Follow our Impact journey here.

About Qonto

Qonto makes it easy for SMEs and freelancers to manage day-to-day banking, thanks to an online business account that’s stacked with invoicing, bookkeeping and spend management tools.

Created in 2016 by Alexandre Prot and Steve Anavi, Qonto now operates in 4 European markets (France, Germany, Italy, and Spain) serving 500,000 customers, and employs more than 1,600 people.

Since its creation, Qonto has raised €622 million from well-established investors. Qonto is one of France’s most highly valued scale-ups and has been listed in the Next40 index, bringing together future global tech leaders, since 2021.

Interested in joining a challenging and game-changing company? Take a look at our open positions.

Illustration by Karina Pasechka.