NatWest Empowers Customers to Reduce Climate Impact with Cogo’s Carbon Footprint Tracking Feature on AWS

Cogo is a climate-focused technology company and an AWS Partner that helps businesses and consumers measure, understand, and reduce their climate impact. It built a carbon footprint tracking feature on AWS for National Westminster Bank (NatWest), to support the bank’s commitment to a nationwide transition to a net-zero, climate-resilient, and sustainable economy.

Cogo built the feature using Amazon API Gateway, AWS Lambda, and Amazon Aurora. By integrating the feature into its retail banking app via an API, NatWest empowers customers to track how their spending impacts the climate and offers suggestions on how they can reduce their carbon footprint.

Cogo is a climate-focused technology company headquartered in New Zealand that helps individuals and businesses such as banks measure, understand, and reduce their impact on the climate. Cogo’s carbon footprint management solutions can be used as standalone apps or integrated into companies’ existing platforms through an application programming interface (API).

According to Cogo, banks play a vital role in the fight against climate change. Banks can integrate carbon footprint tracking—a way to measure an individual’s carbon footprint—into their digital offering to help their customers understand the impact of their spending. Tracking can also influence users to make sustainable behavioral change.

The UK’s National Westminster Bank (NatWest) is committed to supporting the country’s transition towards a net-zero, climate-resilient, and sustainable economy. In 2021, NatWest contracted Cogo to integrate a carbon footprint tracker via an API into its retail banking app. “Our customers didn’t understand what their impact was or what actions they could take to support the drive towards net-zero emissions,” explains Rachael Colville-Walker, senior digital product owner at NatWest Group.

Agility, security, and low latency were requirements for the carbon footprint tracking feature to process large volumes of data from customer transactions on the mobile app. The bank had a tight timeline of six months, aiming to introduce the tracking feature before the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland later that year.  

As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner, Cogo built the API for NatWest on the AWS Cloud. The bank had experience with other partners’ solutions on AWS, which gave it confidence in Cogo’s proposed solution. Plus, AWS is compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). “It makes it easier to work with a partner like Cogo that understands the regulatory environment and our privacy concerns. Solutions built on AWS ticks all the security boxes for a financial organization like ours,” Colville-Walker says.

NatWest carried out a pilot with a test group of customers before rolling out the tracking feature to all retail banking customers. “We built the API in time for the pilot, without specific usage and data requirements upfront. The elasticity of the compute and data storage layers on AWS, and our familiarity with AWS serverless technologies, gave us the confidence to move ahead,” says Andy Newport, chief technology officer at Cogo.

Cogo uses AWS Lambda and Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) for compute and Amazon API Gateway to create and secure APIs at scale. Cogo’s solution also uses Amazon Aurora as a cost-effective relational database management system and Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS) for serverless applications. Its carbon-tracking API is secured using Amazon Cognito as an identity store capable of scaling to millions of users.

After completing a successful pilot, NatWest integrated the carbon footprint tracking feature in its personal financial management app within six months, launching ahead of COP26. “We collaborated closely with Cogo to ensure we could respond quickly and effectively to any challenges faced in terms of technical integration. Everyone was focused on the customer outcome,” shares Colville-Walker.

During the 2021/22 financial year, 300,000 NatWest customers engaged proactively with the carbon footprint feature on the app, spending an average of 4–6 minutes on the app each time. About 37 percent of the users accessing the carbon tracking feature further engaged with actions that impact the climate. In-app suggestions for actions to reduce carbon footprint include switching to LED bulbs and plant-based milk. NatWest is currently planning additional in-app features due to launch at the end of 2022 that are designed to help users measure and reduce their climate impact. 

NatWest’s carbon footprint tracking feature helps its 8 million retail banking customers measure, understand, and reduce their carbon emissions. The bank reports excellent customer feedback on the new feature and is currently working with Cogo on additional climate-change projects.

During the pilot, NatWest tracked an average monthly carbon dioxide (CO2) reduction of 11 kilograms per user, thanks to actions taken by customers using its new feature. If scaled across NatWest's entire customer base, this would equate to 1 billion kilograms of CO2 annually—an equivalent of planting 17 million trees.

Colville-Walker comments, “The carbon tracking feature from Cogo is a differentiator for NatWest and clearly demonstrates our commitment to helping the UK achieve net-zero emissions. A big stepping stone toward meaningful climate impact is education, which is where the carbon tracker plays a role in helping customers understand the impact of their daily actions.”