ekko Launches the Nature Footprint, Enabling Payment Providers to Embed Environmental Impact Insights and Action Into Everyday Spending

WHY THIS MATTERS: The financial services industry is in the midst of a pivot from voluntary environmental, social, and governance (ESG) reporting to mandatory, granular data disclosure. For consumers, this shift is manifesting through deeper integration of sustainability metrics into day-to-day services. This announcement is significant because it elevates the conversation beyond simple carbon tracking, which has become a baseline offering. By launching a real-time biodiversity metric, ekko is demonstrating a critical advancement in sustainable finance. This tool represents a powerful application of embedded finance, bringing sophisticated environmental impact data directly into the transactional flow. It allows banks and payment processors to offer customers a tangible, immediate feedback loop on their spending choices, forging deeper loyalty while simultaneously preparing the payments ecosystem for a future where nature-related risk is a quantifiable factor for every transaction. This moves ESG from a back-office compliance issue to a front-end customer proposition, offering a new competitive advantage in a crowded market.

ekko, a mission-led fintech platform enabling banks, payment providers, and merchants to embed positive environmental action into everyday purchases, today announces the launch of its world-first solution, the Nature Footprint. 

The Nature Footprint is ekko’s real-time biodiversity metric, embedded directly into the payment experience. Through integration with payment providers and financial institutions, it enables consumers to see how their everyday spending impacts the natural world. This helps to raise awareness and educate consumers, enabling them to make more informed and sustainable choices. 

ekko’s Nature Footprint is the first to bring biodiversity impact to the point of payment. It translates complex biodiversity modelling into a clear, real-time metric that shows consumers how their spending affects the living natural world – from habitat loss and land use to pollution – complementing their existing carbon footprinting solution to give consumers a more holistic view of environmental impact.   

Beyond education, the Nature Footprint enables payment providers to offer consumers the option to take action at checkout, such as rounding up purchases to contribute to vetted environmental projects. Working with partners across the payments ecosystem, ekko aims to channel $1 billion USD into sustainability projects worldwide by the end of 2030.     

“Small steps can create monumental change. We know that 80% of consumers want to live more sustainably, but until now they haven’t had a tangible picture of the environmental impact of their everyday purchases. This is where the Nature Footprint will turn the tide,” comments Oli Cook, CEO and Co-Founder of ekko. 

“With 1 trillion purchases happening every year, every 1% of those contributing to meaningful environmental projects can unlock extraordinary impact. By partnering with payment providers, banks, and merchants to embed nature education and action into day-to-day spending, we can turn everyday activities into powerful forces for change. For our commercial partners, this creates an opportunity to deepen customer engagement and retention, stand out in a crowded market, and strengthen their relevance with increasingly values-driven customers.”

The Nature Footprint is a spend-based indication calculated using transaction amounts, merchant category codes, country of purchase, and a life-cycle assessment using ekko’s proprietary methodology, developed alongside expert-driven environmental and social sustainability consultancy, Nature Positive. It draws on peer-reviewed, internationally recognised data sources including EXIOBASE, GLOBIO, AWARE water stress indicators, and biodiversity impact indicators via CDC Biodiversité’s Global Biodiversity Score.  

The indicative footprint is then translated into a relatable area of nature affected, making it easier for consumers to understand – such as the size of a football pitch or a parking space.

“The Nature Footprint turns complex data into something people can actually see and feel. We know consumers want to live more sustainably. Now they have a real-time window into how their everyday spending affects not only climate but the natural world, and a simple way to act on it. The combined action over many millions of payments has an incredible power to transform financial transactions moving forward,” comments Majda Dabaghi, Chief Sustainability Officer at ekko. 

“It is built on the same scientific foundations used by institutional biodiversity analysts, but made accessible through the banking and payment experiences people already use every day. We are helping to build the infrastructure for an economy that takes into account not only the financial cost, but also the environmental one – and we make it possible for everyone, everywhere, to do something about it,” she concludes. 

FF NEWS TAKE: This product decisively moves the needle in the sustainable finance space by giving consumers the first practical tool to measure their direct, real-time impact on the natural world. Previously, biodiversity was too abstract for the point-of-sale experience. The key challenge now shifts from what is measured to who adopts it. We are watching for partnerships with Tier 1 financial institutions to validate the methodology and drive mass consumer adoption. The future of payments is inherently linked to impact; this is infrastructure for that reality.