TraX

The EU Taxonomy on Sustainable Finance is EU’s bet to drive a more sustainable future. Companies, however, are unprepared for the new regulations.TraX will solve their frustrations.

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TraX

Background

The planet is not on course to meet the Paris agreement. To change course, the EU recently set a goal to be climate neutral by 2050 and is implementing a sustainable finance regulation. The EU Taxonomy will require companies with over 500 employees and investors to assess and disclose the level of sustainability in their operations. The purpose is to reorient capital flows towards low-carbon activities, meaning a massive push towards a low-carbon future.

The problem

The clock is ticking. These regulations will take effect from January 2022. Still the majority of companies are unprepared and unaware of the approaching regulations. There are thousands of sustainability KPIs they need to report, new thresholds that need to be met, and screening criterias to keep in mind. Currently, even if companies have data, this data gets lost in pages and pages of unstructured sustainability reports. As a result, companies feel lost as well.

Our solution

We are TraX, a sustainability assessment platform for efficient data collection, calculation and sharing. Our mission is to guide companies through the EU taxonomy, by helping them collect data from partners and internal and external unstructured data sources.

Our product consists of a browser-based interface where a company gets the complete overview of its sustainability profile. Based on all collected data, the Taxonomy sustainability performance is calculated by the TraX data model. Holding end-to-end data, TraX opens the possibility for the ultimate feature; displaying the full value-chain environmental footprint for all consumer goods

Architecture

We will use Vercel and FaunaDB to host the app and data-storage. On the back-end, our platform communicates with open-source data through APIs such as WikiRate API. The aggregation algorithm and automated report generator will be designed in Python using Scikit-Learn and Tensorflow.

Market validation

We have already been in talk with companies wanting to use TraX. According to VP of Sustainability in Cognite, a product like TraX is “exactly what is needed to combat the greatest challenge to sustainability reporting: the lack of data standardization”. Sustainability reporting should be standardized, automated and accurate.

Progress

We are four young professionals: a data scientist, a financial analyst, a software developer and a product manager. This weekend, we took the first steps in designing the infrastructure, data model and interface. Now, we have exactly 472 days to make this work, before the regulations take effect. The taxonomy is EU’s major regulatory bet to drive a more sustainable future, and a platform like TraX is crucial for it to succeed.

Our next steps

In order to develop TraX from a demo to product, the next steps are:

  • Partner with early-adopter companies to guide product development
  • Operationalize data architecture and security on EU data servers
  • Expand and iterate on user interface in collaboration with end-users both with EU companies and suppliers
  • Continue development of Sustainability performance model

This will require 1) funding to continue development, and 2) collaboration partner to guide product development

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