In addressing the climate crisis, Johan Pihl, co-founder, executive creative director and chief innovation officer at Doconomy, believes that the same approaches that created the problems we face today can be used to solve them. “Investments as a catalyst of innovation are directly responsible because they historically focused on optimising our capacity to improve our standard of living,” he says. “The side effect of that historical ambition is now our biggest challenge and is defined as the climate crisis. But we can re-engineer this situation altogether by using the same method of financially fuelled innovation. The financial power that got us into this situation is also what is going to get us out of it.”

Doconomy, which was founded in 2018, has become Pihl and fellow co-founder Mathias Wikström’s way to do that. As a financial technology company, it was created to help consumers better understand the impact caused by their consumption patterns. “We are now venturing into other aspects of measuring environmental impact, both on a lifestyle level and on a corporate level,” says Pihl. “In the end, it’s really about establishing environmental impact as a new language that needs to be part of every decision we make.”

The idea for Doconomy first came to light in 2015 when Pihl and Wikström were working on ways to support the corporate social responsibility work of the Bank of Åland. While there they created the Åland Index, which enables banks, payment providers and financial institutions to offer all customers transaction-based impact calculations on the products they purchase and is now part of Doconomy’s offerings.