From Climate Anxiety to Climate Action: New Fintech Platform Enables Next-Gen Green Financial Decision-Making

Digital product studio ustwo has recently partnered with fintech start-up GreenPortfolio to create a new product design which gives people a transparent and emotive way to make climate-friendly financial decisions. By implementing empathetic design and Play Thinking principles, ustwo developed an interactive user experience that empowers people to fight climate change with their finances — all the while staying engaged and hopeful, instead of anxious and confused.

GreenPortfolio is a SaaS platform that allows people to track the climate impact of their finances. With a proprietary, climate-first scoring system, GreenPortfolio helps subscribers avoid unintentionally investing in fossil fuels, and easily find companies, funds and services in line with their climate values. However, finance and climate change are topics that can feel overwhelming and complicated. To help users stay engaged and take action, GreenPortfolio needed to make sure its user experience felt as emotionally resonant and optimistic as possible.

ustwo was tasked with redesigning GreenPortfolio’s platform to elevate the look, feel, and emotional outcome of the user experience. The challenge was to create a digital experience that felt empowering, rewarding and interactive, rather than a chore to avoid. Through empathetic design and pillars of Play Thinking, ustwo was able to create a friendly solution that surfaces valuable insights and encourages action.

The new design incorporates subtler ways of demonstrating the climate implications of users’ investments, balancing explicit statistics with implied expressions of value. Visual “islands” illustrate in a single glance how green one’s portfolio is, in a playful interpretation of a 0-100 scale. This approach transforms the user’s mindset, turning anxiety about finances or fear of climate change into excitement and action.

Carsten Wierwill, CEO of ustwo Studios said: “We wanted to foster a positive emotional connection between GreenPortfolio users and their finances so they feel confident enough in their financial decisions to take climate action. Our solution offers a compelling example of how people can make everyday sustainable choices in a previously overlooked aspect of their life – armed with the knowledge, the tools, and the motivation to stay engaged. It establishes GreenPortfolio as an insightful, empathetic financial platform and a trusted partner in the collective fight against climate change”.

Elizabeth Landau, COO of GreenPortfolio said: “The combination of ustwo’s experiential design expertise and their passion for addressing climate change made them a great partner for GreenPortfolio. From day one, the team listened to our desire to couple functionality with empowerment so our subscribers can act — voting with their dollars and finding ways to make a positive climate impact”.