Fin-Tech News -

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Related Pre-pandemic (2019) News - [mastercard.com...]

Simply put, the first card ever to prevent consumers from exceeding their limit, not based on credit, but on levels of CO2 emissions caused by their consumption.

Few know about Mastercard's 2019 efforts to attach a non-financial personal score to purchaes because it wasn't widely adopted, and the pandemic happened shortly after the press release. Visa has picked up the batton.

In Today's Financial Technology(Fin-Tech) News

Oct 25th, 2022 = This morning a Vancouver Canada bank, VanCity Bank, announced a partnership with Ecolytiq, a European company, to assign Visa holders a Carbon Footprint score, called a Carbon Counter, based on their purchases starting in Jan 2023. [vancity.com...]

Skipping right past the privacy and potential for abuse issues, and sincerely hoping it remains just a tool people can use to help them make better decisions, I'll ask the first question that comes to mind... webmaster related.

- Which hosting provider has the best Carbon Counter score and is set to receive a whole lot more business? Which has the worst score and is going to start losing customers as Carbon Counters become a new norm? It would be helpful to know this before making a purchase and being penalized or rewarded.

Another question...
- How is using a CDN like Cloudflare going to factor into my Carbon Score if their service is free but I have to pay the host that's best for my business but might not have the best score?

And another...
- Should all webmasters get a business credit card to avoid having personal purchases possibly affect their website Carbon Score?

And another...
- What's your carbon counter score? I'm not sure I can afford you this month.

edit: More about FinTech from the Bank of Canada - [bankofcanada.ca...]

[graeme_p]

On the privacy and abuse bit, it sounds a lot like a privatised version of Chinese social credit.

I do not believe that this will be widely taken up. I certainly hope it will not.

Carbon footprint is a very crude and inaccurate measure even for CO₂ emissions, and does not take other environmental effects into account at all. What it does is reward those who are best at gaming the numbers.

The other problem with IT services of any kind is that this is country level. A single country may have a hosts using electricity from coal power, and others using solar. Some hosts may lengthen the life of hardware, other replace often. Some may use more efficient hardware to start with. Then, how do you identify what country the hardware is in? If I pay AWS, how does my credit card company know where the server running my services is? Do they assume it is in the US because the provider is American, or in the UK because I am in England? Lots of people use multiple regions, or the region their customers are in (e.g. tourism).

[LifeinAsia]

I think a bigger question is how many people will stop using cards that start delving into social issues that (in my opinion) they have no business being in? Especially when there are so many technical issues, many of which have already been mentioned.

[ronin]

I think a bigger question is how many people will stop using cards

It's a good question.

I still use my debit card on a near-daily basis.

But I cut up my credit card nineteen years ago and, honestly, I've never missed it.

(To be fair, I only had it for nine years before that and I don't think I ever used it very much.)

[martinibuster]

VanCity Bank is a niche values-based co-operative, the members own the bank. The bank's committed to being environmentally friendly, etc.

Doconomy is also a niche values-based organization, "a Swedish fin-tech startup for everyday climate action"

Those are niche organizations, not a trend that will affect you or anyone else unless you actually seek them out.

Good grief. This is literally nothing. It's not coming to get you or anyone else and is not a trend. It's a niche banking trend.

This is not news.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

I think a bigger question is how many people will stop using cards that start delving into social issues.

Gov, Bank, Credit card and project designer all asked themselves that, and planned for it. So, none?

I get the feeling few are up to speed on where western countries want to be by 2030, it's not like there aren't enough distractions in the world right now(bad joke). The following is for Canada but not Canada-centric. official sources only, everyone needs to inform themselves from the source, come to your own opinions, make your own decisions etc. This post is NOT about the politics, it's about the future as a webmaster.

Please keep responses related to running a business online, but do inform yourself about the changes coming.

- Official: Digital only currency(bank has no plan to implement it yet, they are only creating it, official from Canada's bank) - [bankofcanada.ca...]

- What is the ESG score powering "Carbon Points" - [pwc.com...]

- Official: Make ESG compatible with China's social system for Canadian businesses (from Canada's trade commisioner) - [tradecommissioner.gc.ca...]

From Canada's Gov, 2021. "A grocery store purchase involves one payment but for many items. A digital only mobile payment system is already capable of getting the full breakdown of ALL items in that one purchase. It was needed to be able to assign a score PER ITEM. A digital only currency can be made to refuse payment(voluntarily) on a single item but accept payment for the rest. For example, if a specific item in your basket puts you over your carbon points limit or if the manufacturer got an ESG downgrade and it costs more carbon points that you have, you can block your own purchase for that specific item. It can be temporarily unpurchasable (to you AND/OR by the person/store).

Question: For a score to be accurate alternative payment options that don't provide the data, like cash, have to be deprecated don't they?

Stuff like that which is the official direction being taken according to gov themselves is hard to grasp. Regardless, when you're up to speed... how is your business/website going to change? The more you think about it the more questions you're likely to have.

- Question: After you see how far along your country is towards the 2030 goal what challenges do you think it will present to your web activities/business? Need a new host? New workforce? New monetization method?

- Question: You want to buy a website or web service from your neighbor but their score is not good enough, you can't pay them because they opted not to receive payment for 2 weeks for score related reasons, what can you do?

These are questions I have after reading the official gov sources, I'm sure there's lots I haven't even remotely considered. Now is the time to discuss how our profession will change. Another question that just came to mind....

QUESTION: It's hard enough to convince a buyer your item is affordable. If you're not the most carbon friendly option how do you convince them to also take a points hit in order to support you?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Martinibuster?

VanCity Bank is a niche values-based co-operative, the members own the bank.

VanCity is a credit union owned by native Canadians. Dismissing them as "niche" is not cool. Credit Unions are popular in Canada and that one is a top 10 financial institution up there.

Doconomy is also a niche values-based organization, "a Swedish fin-tech startup for everyday climate action"

... who are working with gov and mastercard and, as you can see in their press release, willing to stop you from making purchases with your money for social reasons.

Good grief. This is literally nothing. It's not coming to get you or anyone else and is not a trend. It's a niche banking trend. This is not news.

Conspiracy, niche, a nothingburger. Understood, yet I read the planned changes from the Canadian gov's website. The "2030 goal" has a target date even.

I asked for ideas on navigating the changes described on a gov website after Visa, Gov, One of B.C.s largest credit unions and a foreign company teamed to make it happen. Assigning scores to people's purchase history isn't "literally nothing". Feel free to tell me if SearchEngineJournal has a plan for an ESG score, they are being made mandatory in Canada. If it's just me you have issue with, please sticky me directly.

I'm looking for ideas on navigating the changes from a webmaster online business point of view. 2030 isn't far off.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

[weforum.org...]

ESG is being adopted by governments and business leaders all over the west, especially in Canada and New Zealand, Australia, across Europe etc. What changes will webmasters have to make to navigate ESG metrics in a cashless world? That's what I'd like discussion about. It could be useful to plan for.

The investment world is WAY ahead of the search crowd in this discussion, it seems. [forbes.com...]

Nobody is coming for anyone, this is how leaders are changing the world right now, it's OK to talk about it.

[tangor]

Sadly, all stated above is actually politics, not economics or even webmastering. However, I will start tracking this to see if there's a trend or movement in that direction.

ESG, at present, is under attack by State Governments in the USA and I suspect there will be some fireworks down the line.

Time will tell. My crystal ball is broke and cloudy.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Nov 15th, 2022 update - [businesswire.com...]

Mastercard, Wells Fargo, Citigroup and others launch a 12-week digital dollar pilot program with the New York Fed.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Dec 18th, 2022 update - [europarl.europa.eu...]

[edited by: Sgt_Kickaxe at 11:32 pm (utc) on Dec 18, 2022]

[phranque]

i read the linked article.
twice.
i totally missed this both times:

The ENTIRE European Union(EU) is going to assign a personal carbon score to ALL individuals in order to implement an Emissions Trading System (ETS).

did you link to the correct article?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

For your pleasure I edited the post. I'm not going to debate you, it's happening. Read up on Emissions Trading System (ETS) yourself and ask how they'll know what to charge each individual, and assign them a score, if they aren't going to see your every purchase and activity.

Read up on their Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism(CARB) too. It's not just all EU citizens, it's everyone trading with the EU too.

If you care to translate there are many German sites reporting on digital ID, currency, and implementation for citizens - [nos.nl...]

[ronin]

This is a meta point, but it's important:

I'm not going to debate you, it's happening

That's argument by assertion. It's not an argument.

Read up on Emissions Trading System (ETS) yourself and ask how [...]

No. That's bad academic form.

If you want to make a point, you summarise what you've read, you cite references, you quote from those references fairly and you present a compelling case which supports your thesis.

Separately, yes government is far from perfect today. Yes, it's often five steps forward and two steps back. But the trajectory since the late mediaeval era has been forward. As a thought experiment consider whether you would like to be transported back to before the Magna Carta was signed? Or to any time between its signing and now? If there's an era you'd like to be transported to, I'd be keen to hear it.

You don't have to answer that last question - it's rhetorical.

This post is simply a meta comment, because I grew tired a while back with conversations on the web which ended with "End of discussion. Do your own research." etc. (Not least because "research" in this case is merely trawling Google snippets to find any and all excerpts of dubious provenance which satisfy ones confirmation bias - and needless to say, that isn't research.)

Individuals presenting paranoid perspectives as fact isn't the only reason why I left Facebook in 2019, but it's one of the main ones. I get that untold millions of people are socio-economically disenfranchised - but it's important to accurately assess why they are instead of promoting big bad wolf theories. Pareto's 80/20 law - a re-presentation of the statistical normal distribution curve - is rarely invoked (presumably because if you asked most people what a normal distribution is they wouldn't immediately respond it's a bell curve - or necessarily have even heard of a "bell curve"), but it explains a lot of statistical outcomes, which right-wing populists like to place at the door of malevolent, partisan human agency).

I should underline that I enjoy our interactions on WW, @Sgt_Kickaxe - not least I agree with many of the points you make. I think you're better than this.

We can all seek to make compelling points. But the burden is on us to adequately substantiate them and to defend against reasonable scepticism and / or refutation.

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Ronin, you're not going to have to read up on it, it's already approved in the EU so you're going to have to live it.

Digital only currency + digital ID with a social score attached = potentially very abusable level of control on your life. (See life in China)

Every bank is now working on a digital currency, "just in case" - example: [bankofcanada.ca...]

You'll know where things are going if/when they retire non-digital funds completely. ie: digital only.