Nexi, Europe's leading PayTech, today launches Planet Care, a new sustainability-oriented service designed to raise awareness among the public for the need for a more informed and environmentally friendly approach to daily consumption habits.
The service provides consumers with an opportunity to make an ongoing, concrete contribution to the protection of our planet.
The Planet Care service provides Nexi cardholders with information on the impact their purchases are having on the environment, enabling them to play an active role in reducing this impact.
The way it works is simple - a new carbon calculator on the Nexi Pay app, informs users of the amount of CO₂ produced by their purchases. This is estimated by a weighted calculation based on the amount spent and the type of product purchased. With each new transaction, the overall quantity of CO₂ produced is automatically updated, giving users the opportunity to check the environmental impact of their purchases.
Andrea Mencarini, Cards & Digital Payments Director at Nexi states, "A company wishing to play a leading role in the market must not only comply with the principles of sustainability that now guide investment choices, but it must also ensure that these same principles are understood and upheld by all stakeholders. This is why we have launched Planet Care - to make our cardholders more aware of the environmental impact that their purchases have. It also allows them to be actively involved in contributing to the protection of our planet."
Through Planet Care, Nexi intends to expand its reach on ESG issues, integrating the central role of sustainability, not only within the company, but in its employees' daily activities, and with the involvement of the public to promote a more environmentally-friendly approach to consumption.
In the coming weeks, the service will be enriched with a feature that allows users to decide whether to offset all or part of the CO₂ produced from their purchase, through a donation to a nonprofit organisation partnered with Nexi. This feature allows users to make an active contribution to the protection of our planet.
In this initial roll-out phase, this service is available to Mastercard cardholders, and all donations will go to PlasticFree, a company which works on eliminating plastic pollution, and consequently CO₂ emissions.
Customers who are interested in how these donated amounts will be used, can visit the PlasticFree website. In the future, customers will be able to choose which nonprofit organisations they wish to donate to, from the pool of Nexi partners which have joined the service.
The launch of Planet Care is another step towards an even greater reduction in Nexi’s global environmental footprint, and is part of its sustainability journey which begun in February 2019, when the company established the Sustainability Risk and Control Committee. Since then, Nexi’s ambitious ESG commitments have been recognised by other organisations. Its goal to achieve net-zero emissions by 2040 has received approval from the Science Based Targets initiative, and it received a seven-point increase in its ESG rating in the 2021 S&P Global Corporate Sustainability Assessment.