Sustainability at Revolut: here's what we do to help the planet 🌎
10 March 2022Team Revolut
At Revolut, we’re changing the way people use and interact with technology, and shaping the future of financial and lifestyle experiences.
But a company for the future needs to holistically align with the needs of the future - not just the economic needs, but also the environmental and societal needs of the world around us.
So we’re on a mission to put global sustainability at the heart of all we do at Revolut.
Tackling climate change
Climate change is a reality we all have to face, and we all have a responsibility to the wellbeing of our communities and the recovery of our planet.
As we’re building the first truly global financial super app, we want to make sure that we do so sustainably, and that our customers keep control of their impact on the environment, by reducing our own impact as much as possible.
We’re committed to driving change and we’re proud to have joined Tech Zero in 2021, an initiative gathering British and global tech companies ready to fight the climate crisis through technology, data and science.
Measuring our carbon footprint
We offer all our services digitally and we don’t have physical branches, which allows us to keep the emissions from our facilities’ usage limited.
Nonetheless, our regular business activities still contribute to climate change, which is why we’ve partnered with Watershed to help us measure our carbon footprint in real-time, establish clear strategies to reduce our impact in every aspect of our business, and report on those emissions.
We measure our carbon footprint in line with industry standards, following the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, and including all Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions in our calculations:
- Scope 1: direct emissions - less than 1% of our footprint
- Scope 2: indirect emissions, for example, the emissions associated to the production of the electricity we purchase - less than 5% of our footprint
- Scope 3: emissions owned by our suppliers that Revolut doesn’t directly own - 95% of our footprint
Carbon footprint breakdown
Below is a breakdown of our 2020 carbon footprint by major category. As our company is still growing fast we want to give everyone visibility on how the efficiency of our operations evolve over time. We’ll report our footprint in tCO2 per 1 million $ revenue, and aim at reducing both our carbon footprint and carbon footprint/revenue.
Our 2020 carbon footprint was 60tCO2 per 1 million $ revenue. It dropped by 34% compared to 2019.
- Goods & Services are the emissions related to the goods and services we buy from our vendors
- Products are the services we offer to our customers
- Offices accounts for our office space around the world
- Employees illustrates the footprint generated by our employees working from home, commuting, etc.
- Cloud is linked to our use of cloud computing platforms
Reducing our impact
The pandemic has altered our activity in 2020. For this reason, we’ll take both 2019 and 2020 data into account to choose a proper benchmark and build a sound reduction strategy, with help from Watershed.
- Our packaging has been re-designed to use less material, be free of plastic and fully recyclable
- We sort and recycle waste in our offices, across all locations
- As a tech company, what we do with our IT equipment is very important for us: this is why whenever possible, we donate or refurbish any redundant electronic equipment when it reaches its end-of-life. If it cannot be refurbished or reused, we make sure that none of our electronic equipment ends up in a landfill and is properly disposed of
- We’re reducing the size of our offices, as our employees now benefit from flexible working policies
- All our UK employees have access to the Cycle to Work scheme to encourage the use of environmentally friendly transport
Partnerships and donations
We make it easy for our customers to be part of the change. We constantly support and run donation campaigns to NGOs and groups that engage in support to stop climate change, help war refugees and advocate equal rights for everyone.
We’ve been cooperating with global and local sustainability charity partners such as WWF, Rainforest Alliance or Open Cages, helping them to raise funds through Revolut Donations platform.
Did you know that Revolut’s customers have donated over £1 million to green, sustainability and climate charities? And they're not done yet!