How Green FinTech Can Alleviate the Impact of Climate Change—The Case of Switzerland

The financial services industry is currently undergoing a major transformation, with digitization and sustainability being the core drivers. While both concepts have been researched in recent years, their intersection, often conceived as “green FinTech,” remains under-determined. Therefore, this paper contributes to this important discussion about green FinTech by, first, synthesizing the relevant literature systematically. Second, it shows the results of an empirical, in-depth analysis of the Swiss FinTech landscape both in terms of green FinTech startups as well as the services offered by the incumbents. The research results show that literature in this new domain has only emerged recently, is mostly characterized by a specific focus on isolated aspects of green FinTech and does not provide a comprehensive perspective on the topic yet. In addition, the results from the literature and the market analysis indicate that green FinTech has an impact along the whole value chain of financial services covering customer-to-customer (c2c), business-to-customer (b2c), and business-to-business (b2b) services. Today the field is predominantly captured by startup companies in contrast to the incumbents whose solutions are still rare.


Introduction
Sustainable finance and more specifically climate-related finance gained increased importance on company, national and supranational levels over the past years. But still, the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) requires significant investments of at least $3 trillion per year globally and $1.4 trillion in developing countries [1,2]. Such huge investments will finally ensure that the Paris Agreement's key objective of keeping the global average temperature increase below 2°C can be met. The most straightforward way to finance this goal is to boost government spending, which inevitably burdens taxpayers, or affects under-invested sectors.
Private capital is an additional source to achieve this goal. The Paris Agreement includes a commitment to "[making] finance flows consistent with a pathway toward low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development" (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) 2015, p. 2, Article 2.1 (c)). In other words, the private sector should steer its investment efforts towards more sustainable goals. Such investments not only contribute to the achievement of the Paris Agreement goals, but also unleash cleaner, cheaper and more effective operations and may lead to technology induced innovations beyond today's value chains. Potential funding sources may come from companies and banks but also from consumers. For example, in November 2019, the European Investment Bank decided to end financing for fossil fuel energy projects by the end of 2021. This will aid to push climate action and environmental sustainability strategies further and focus on support for clean energy and security. However, to achieve this goal, many challenges are ahead. Among them are low transparency for investors of companies with regard to their products and supply chains, a lack in financial products, etc.
Due to the enormous investments required to achieve the SDGs, one of the major levers for alleviating the impact of climate change is the financial system which has been of fundamental as well as global importance ever since. The financial system, in general, has an essential function within the economy.
It is channeling funds from those with surplus funds to those with shortages of funds [3]. "Banking really is at the nexus of the real economy" [4] (see also [5]) by e.g., providing payments infrastructures, directing financial capital to economic activities and offering investment opportunities in companies.
These essential functions of the financial system, besides sustainability, have been challenged in recent years by digitization being one of the core drivers of the financial system as the products and processes are digital by definition [6]. Banks for example have the highest IT investments across all industries with 4.7 to 9.4% on average, whereas airlines spend only 2.6% of their revenues in IT [7]. While a high share of those expenditures is reserved for maintaining or adapting legacy systems, digitization describes a trend which is closely tied to innovation and covers all areas of financial processes ranging from payments and investments to financing. That's why it is often termed as the financial technology (FinTech) revolution [6]. While in its early phases FinTech was primarily concentrated on innovations by start-ups like Ripple, Wealthfront or LendingClub, recently also the incumbent banks and the so called Big Tech companies (Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple; often called "GAFA") as well as their Chinese counterparts Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent (BAT) either cooperated with those start-ups or provided their own FinTech services. As part of this trend, various institutions and initiatives have emerged at the intersection of FinTech and climate change like the United Nations Task Force on Digital Financing of the Sustainable Development Goals (www.digitalfinancingtaskforce.org) as well as many start-ups focusing on areas such as robo-advisors for sustainable investments, payment tokens for peerto-peer energy networks or blockchain solutions for sustainable supply chains [8]. These so-called "Green FinTech" solutions are an emerging area with the purpose to alleviate climate change risks and which are relevant to policy makers, particularly in emerging and developing countries, as they pursue the implementation of the Paris Agreement and achievement of the SDGs. Green FinTech links all relevant actors along the value chain ranging from consumers, (central) banks, insurers, non-banks (start-ups, Big Tech firms), (technology) providers, regulators, etc. And, as the financial system provides central functions also to other industries, it becomes also increasingly linked to other industries enabled by digitization like the energy sector providing digital infrastructures for peer-to-peer payments and many others. The potentials of such solutions are manifold and range from more transparent, blockchain-based supply chains for consumers to investment solutions which only consider sustainable companies and products. But this outlined development is still in its very beginnings and thus, a framework for a more detailed analysis of such solutions and their impact is still missing.
The aim of this paper is to analyze the state of the art in this young discipline and develop a framework based on a comprehensive literature analysis. The academic literature is then used in another step to map the incumbents and start-ups from the financial services industry against the environmental SDGs.
For this, the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 describes the research methodology and defines basic elements of the analysis. Section 3 provides an overview of existing research in the field of FinTech overall as well as in the context of climate change specifically. Section 4 provides a short introduction to the environmental sustainability efforts in Switzerland coupled with locally relevant factors to combat climate change. Section 5 analyzes and classifies the existing landscape of Green FinTech start-ups and incumbent solutions in Switzerland while section 6 concludes the major findings.

Research Methodology
In order to analyze the implications of FinTech innovations in the context of climate change, a threestep research procedure has been applied.
In a first step, a literature review helped analyze the existing approaches and develop a classification model for a structured overview of innovations in this field (see section 3).
The second step focused on the collection of Green FinTech solutions according to the classification model which matched the following four criteria: (1) it supports the interaction of a customer with a financial institution or a non-financial institution, (2) it has a relationship to a customer process in financial services (advisory, payments, investments, financing, non-life insurance life insurance, underwriting, claims management, and cross-processes) and/or an indirect relation to financial services while being part of another industry's ecosystem (e.g., p2p payment in energy networks) , (3) it is supported by IT and (4) it has an impact on one of the climate related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). For this analysis, a broad variety of databases, tweets, blogs and events was screened and 24 FinTech solutions from start-ups as well as 13 solutions from incumbents were identified and surveyed in more detail. The collection phase was conducted from September 2019 to November 2019, updated between May and June 2020 and the solutions were analyzed afterwards.
In a third step, the Green FinTech innovations were reviewed with practitioners from the financial services industry beginning in November 2019 to validate the results and reveal practical relevance. In this process, companies from various fields of the financial value chain were involved (e.g. banks, providers, etc.). This third step led to an iterative adaption of the results and findings.
For this research, Switzerland was chosen due to four interrelated reasons: (1) The country is ranked under the top five countries in IMD's digital ranking [9], (2) Switzerland has one of the most developed financial systems in the world and is the biggest international hub with regard to the assets under management [9] and (3) is at the forefront of the sustainability movement with, for example, the WWF and UN headquarters in Gland (VD), and Geneva, respectively. (4) The authors have access to a large number of FinTech start-ups based in Switzerland.

Literature Review
This paper contributes to two rapidly developing strands of literature. The first area is related to the concept of FinTech. The other literature field is related to the interaction between fintech and climate change issues, giving rise to "Green FinTech" as a specific subdomain of FinTech.
The term ''FinTech is an abbreviation for ''Financial Technology''. It is believed that is was introduced in the early 1990s by Citicorp's chairman John Reed in the context of a newly founded ''Smart Card Forum'' consortium: ''Speaking a language of cooperation between companies and across industries, (…) Citicorp has shed its historical insistence on calling its own technological tune. The harmony emanating from the Smart Card Forum has attracted about 30 dues-payers, including leaders from financial services and high technology. Another 30 have shown an interest in joining. Along with another Citicorp-initiated banking research project called Fintech, it tends to disarm any remaining criticism about Citicorp's being arrogantly out of touch with market preferences'' [10].
FinTech relates to innovative financial solutions enabled by IT. In addition, it is often used for start-up companies that develop such solutions as well as incumbent financial services providers [6]. Literature has just recently analyzed this trend in more detail and depicts it as solutions which are characterized by (1) the application of IT in the financial services domain, (2) start-ups which provide services for financial processes, and (3) services covering all relevant financial services processes ranging from payments, investments and financing [6]. While FinTech originally focused more on banks, the term "InsurTech" or "Insurance Technology" closely relates to IT innovations in the insurance industry like digital brokers or peer-to-peer insurances [11].
Some publications use the term FinTech for both areas, an approach which this paper also follows in the following sections (e.g., [6,12]). While some publications see FinTech and InsurTech as a possibility to improve business and IT alignment [13], most of them focus on FinTech as an enabler of innovations for the financial services industry. Thus, the term is closely related to the term ''financial innovation'', which is defined as the ''(…) act of creating and then popularizing new financial instruments as well as new financial technologies, institutions and markets'' [14]. Financial innovations distinguish five categories of innovation objects [14,15]: (1) products and services, (2) organizational structures (e.g., outsourcing of credit processing) and (3) processes (e.g., online credit application and processing). As FinTech relies on IT as an enabler, (4) systems (e.g., blockchain as a new financial infrastructure) as well as (5) business models (e.g., crowdlending) [16,17)] are also important categories. The dimensions innovation degree (e.g., radical or incremental) and innovation scope (e.g., intra-or inter-organizational) complement these five perspectives with a more comprehensive macro level view [14,15,16,17].
One of the goals of this paper is to enhance the notion and definition of Green FinTech. Green or climate related goals are part of the broader term of "sustainability" which is most commonly defined as a "development that meets the needs of the present without comprising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs" [18]. Sustainability comes with a long-term view touching upon the three areas of economic prosperity, environmental protection, and social equity [19]. While sustainability in a broader context also involves economic prosperity and social equity, this research focuses specifically on environmental protection and climate change as major goals of sustainability. The concept that a business can result in both financial and environmental benefits is in line with sustainability goals and related concepts like the circular economy, etc. [20,21]. According to Arena et al. [22], such innovations smartly combine impact objectives (e.g., impact on sustainable development) with business objectives (e.g., impact on revenues and/or costs).
The intersection of environmental protection and finance has been part of the discussion in the field of "Green Finance". For example, Höhne et al. [23] propose the following definition for Green Finance: "Green finance is a broad term that can refer to financial investments flowing into sustainable development projects and initiatives, environmental products, and policies that encourage the development of a more sustainable economy. Green finance includes climate finance but is not limited to it. It also refers to a wider range of "other environmental objectives, for example industrial pollution control, water sanitation, or biodiversity protection. Mitigation and adaptation finance is specifically related to climate change related activities: mitigation financial flows refer to investments in projects and programs that contribute to reducing or avoiding greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) whereas adaptation financial flows refer to investments that contribute to reducing the vulnerability of goods and persons to the effects of climate change." In addition, Zadek and Flynn [24] claim that "Green finance is often used interchangeably with green investment. However, in practice, green finance is a wider lens including more than investments. Most important is that it includes operational costs of green investments not included under the definition of green investment. Most obviously, it would include costs such as project preparation and land acquisition costs, both of which are not just significant but can pose distinct financing challenges." While green finance has a broad view across banking and finance covering all fields from payments, investment to financing, the term "Green FinTech" as a subarea has been developing rapidly in recent years and is more focused on topics which are discussed in the context of environmental protection, finance based on technology innovations. Green FinTech therefore specifically focuses on those According to one of the very few definitions of the term from Arena et al. [22], Green FinTech innovations are defined by a blended-value mission entailing the coexistence of impact objectives (e.g., increasing the flow of financial resources for sustainable development) and business objectives (e.g., safeguarding a financial return to be able to continue creating impact in the long run). But as this discipline is still very young, a common definition has not yet being established in literature. Therefore, in order to analyze the existing theory in more detail, a literature analysis was undertaken comprising five steps [25]: (1) Definition of the scope of the analysis, (2) literature search, (3) selection of the final sample, (4) corpus analysis and (5) presentation of the findings.
In the first step the relevant search terms were delineated and comprised "Green FinTech", "green financial technology" and "green digital finance", "sustainability AND fintech", "climate AND With these four databases a broad universe of academic literature can be covered and thus the existing knowledge be identified. For the search itself, papers were excluded that provided work in progress papers from conference proceedings, panel introductions, papers which are not available in English, unavailable papers, teaching cases and pedagogical research papers. Each publication was downloaded and read through. In the third step, the selection of the final sample was performed.
The final sample comprised 92,717 papers from which 193 papers were identified as relevant for further analysis after reading through the papers' abstracts and keywords and after deleting doubles (see Table   1). In a next step, all 193 papers were analyzed in more detail. In an additional step, backward and forward search was taken out. In the fourth step, each paper was first classified according to descriptive elements like title of the paper, author(s), publication outlet (journal or conference name), type of publication outlet (journal or conference), abstract, keyword, theories, methods (empirical), methods (non-empirical) and definitions. In the fifth step, the findings of the analysis are presented.

Search terms
Databases "green fintech" OR "green financial technology" OR "green digital finance" OR "climate" AND "fintech" OR "sustainability" AND "fintech"   [43] Geoforum Cryptocarbon: The promises and pitfalls of forest protection on a blockchain

AIS Electronic
How blockchain can help to address fundamental problems with market-based forest protection globally. [44] Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing System architecture for blockchain based transparency of supply chain social sustainability Develops a system architecture that integrates the use of blockchain, internet-of-things (IoT) and big data analytics to allow sellers to monitor their supply chain social sustainability efficiently and effectively [45] International Journal of Information Management Blockchain technology in supply chain management for sustainable performance: Evidence from the airport industry Investigates the major implications of blockchain technology for operations management (OM) with a focus on the decision-making processes in supply chain management (SCM) from the perspective of sustainable performance. [46] Applied Energy Applying blockchain in the geoenergy domain: The road to interoperability and standards Potential of blockchain technologies to develop further geoenergy sector. [47] Resources Policy The development of energy blockchain and its implications for China's energy sector Analyzes how China can employ blockchain technology to reform its energy sector. [48] Journal of Electronic Science and Technology Blockchain energy: Blockchain in future energy systems Discusses the applicability and prospects for blockchain-based technologies in the energy sector, which are described using the term "blockchain energy" [49] Journal of Cleaner Production Proposing the use of blockchain to improve the solid waste management in small municipalities Use of blockchains for the solid waste management in a small municipality in Brazil. [50] Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews Exploring blockchain for the energy transition: Opportunities and challenges based on a case study in Japan Blockchain contribution for sustainable energy production.
[51] Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews Review of blockchain-based distributed energy: Implications for institutional development Explore potential challenges of blockchain-based P2P microgrids, and propose practical implications for institutional development as well as academia. [52] Proceedings of ICT for Sustainability

Boosting the Renewable Energy Economy with NRGcoin
NRGcoin benefits for stakeholders in the smart grid and for the renewable energy economy as a whole. [53] Computer Communication Research on the application of block chain big data platform in the construction of new smart city for low carbon emission and green environment The role of the smart big data platform for the development of smart cities.
[   Second, most papers which were identified in the literature analysis primarily focus on specific, very often isolated aspects of Green FinTech. An example is an electronic marketplace supported by FinTech in the field of agricultural sustainability [26] or the analysis for feasibility of the FinTech industry as an innovation platform for sustainable economic growth in Korea [33]. Most of these papers specifically research single aspects of fintech like electronic marketplaces or certain industries or countries or technologies (e.g., IoT). Only a few papers develop a more comprehensive view like the paper on "sustainable supply chain finance: towards a research agenda" which conducts a literature analysis and shows future areas of research [27].
Third, another category of papers provides cases of Green FinTech in certain areas. One example is a study on how a blockchain-enabled emission trading framework can improve the fashion apparel manufacturing industry [65]. Another example focuses on the question how blockchain technology in irrigation systems can integrate photovoltaic energy generation systems [68]. Other examples are focusing on certain topics like smart cities or smart homes and the potentials of Green FinTech in this these areas [80]. Most of these case studies only research single cases and do not focus on developing frameworks which would be possible from multi-case study settings.  Besides these differences, the analysis of the literature revealed five major patterns which can be mapped to the FinTech related domains (see [17]):  Provider type: One major category to distinguish Green FinTech solutions from the literature analysis is the provider type. This can either be a banking solution or an insurance related solution.
 Interaction type: The interaction type relates to the stakeholders who are involved in a Green FinTech solution. For example, in the example of energy production, distribution and consumption, consumer-to-consumer (c2c), business-to-consumer (b2c) and business-to-business (b2b) interactions are relevant while for peer-to-peer energy networks in which only consumers are involved only c2c plays a relevant role (e.g., [36,39]).
 Direct financial processes: Direct financial processes are specific Green FinTech processes like advisory, payments, investments, financing, non-life insurance, life insurance, underwriting, claims management and other cross-processes. Examples in this field are robo-advisors which enable customers to invest in green asset classes (investments) through self-advice (advisory).
 Indirect financial processes: Very often the literature uses Green FinTech in the context of other industries like the energy sector, agricultural supply chains or the mobility sector to leverage FinTech. An example is a supply chain solution which includes digital financing possibilities for farmers in developing countries [26].

Environmental Sustainability in Switzerland
Switzerland has committed itself to achieve the 17  First, the largest emitter in Switzerland is transport (see Figure 1), which accounts for around one third of all emissions. This is followed by buildings (heating), industry, agriculture and waste treatment.
While no major progress has been made in transport, emissions from buildings and industry have fallen sharply from 1990 levels. Thus, transportation and buildings are a huge lever for change.

bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/territory-environment/environmental-accounting.html)
Second, Switzerland's environmental footprint is significantly clouded by greenhouse gas emissions from imported goods and services (see Figure 2). Imported emissions account for approximately two thirds of Switzerland's total carbon footprint. For example, an analysis shows that the lion's share of the environmental burden derives from the production of Swiss products from the mechanical, electrical and metal industries in foreign supply chains. Specifically, about 80% of the greenhouse gas emissions and 95% of the particulate emissions. Thus, imported emission is a further huge lever for change.

Domestic Emissions
Third, climate tests in 2017 revealed that Swiss institutional investors are not invested in green energies yet (see Figure 3). 79 pension funds and insurance companies representing 65% of the total capital market participated in a test in 2017. Around 60% of their exposure is in coal, oil and gas, while only 10% is in renewable energies. Today's investment plans of the pension funds and insurance companies' listed equity and corporate bonds portfolios are currently on a 6°C pathway. These results were confirmed by the same study in 2020 again. This shows that the Swiss financial market not only continues to invest significantly in oil and coal production, but even expanded its investments in some Related to the financial system, Switzerland also actively participates in the work of international financial bodies and works on a coherent policy in this area at both the national and international levels.
Currently, the primary instrument is a pilot test to analyze the climate alignment of financial portfolios.

The Green FinTech Landscape in Switzerland
Today, the incumbent financial institutions from the insurance and banking industry mostly are investors in FinTech and InsurTech start-ups rather than introducing own novel and innovative solutions beside some isolated services in payments (e.g., the mobile payment application Twint). This is in line with the findings from previous research that radical innovations more frequently emerge from new market entrants rather than from the incumbents [85]. However, in recent years the incumbents also caught up in certain areas and in the meantime either partner with the start-ups or offer their own solutions. Therefore, this paper looks at both the start-ups and the incumbents offering Green FinTech solutions.

Nr. Green FinTech Provider Description of Solution 1 Beedoo
Beedoo provides an impact investment platform for consumers who aim to invest in sustainable firms and assets.

Bitlumens
BitLumens distributes solar power devices in areas without a power-grid and connects them to the blockchain. By using the devices, people build up credit scores and investors can view where the machines are located and how much power these generate. Remitters can pay for their family's electricity bills providing transparency and security of transactions.

Bloomio
Bloomio is a digital investment platform which connects individual investors with sustainability oriented projects.

4
Blueyellow blueyellow digitalizes green energy investments through a platform for buying and selling renewable energy fintech solutions.

Carbon Delta
Carbon Delta provides the "Climate Value-at-Risk" (CVaR) solution which is a valuation assessment method to measure climate related risks and opportunities in an investment portfolio. It offers insights into how climate change could affect company valuations.

CelsiusPro
CelsiusPro is an InsurTech company that specializes in industrializing index insurance solutions to mitigate the effects of adverse weather, climate change and natural catastrophes.

Covalence
Covalence supports investors in integrating environment, social and governance (ESG) factors while controlling greenwashing based on an artificial intelligence-based scoring system.

Energy Web
Energy Web is a nonprofit organization focusing on a low-carbon, customer-centric electricity system based on blockchain and other decentralized technologies. It focuses on building core infrastructure and shared technology.

Greenmatch
Greenmatch provides a solution to analyze, track the performance of and allow buying and selling of wind energy, photovoltaics, hydropower and biomass projects on a digital marketplace.

Ground_Up
Ground_Up source connects the entrepreneur and investor sides of the SDG investment marketplace for investments under $20 million that contribute to the SDGs.

Guruvest
Guruvest is a platform for impact investing by using blockchain and collective intelligence. It decouples the investment decision process from the holding of the assets and uses artificial intelligence to categorize and match trading strategies with investors, similar like the Amazon recommendation engine.

Impaakt
Impaakt develops company impact scores which indicate the environmental and social value of a company. The scale runs from -5 to +5 based on the positive or negative impact a company has on the world. The scores are built based on articles and ratings contributed by the Impaakt community.

IUCN Green List & Porini
The IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas is a global standard of best practice for area-based conservation. It is a blockchain-based solution of certification for protected and conserved areas like national parks, natural World Heritage sites, community conserved areas, nature reserves, etc.

My Drop in the Ocean
My Drop in the Ocean develops a global currency platform called DIO. It rewards consumers and businesses for their sustainable actions, in turn, returning value to nature. The platform creates a link between the value of environmental costs and the issuing of a digital currency that can be used by consumers to pay for purchases at participating businesses. DIO are initially issued equitably to individuals as credits, reflecting nature's shared value to all of us, and are converted to rewards through sustainable actions captured on the online platform.

Pexapark
Pexapark develops digital forms of financial Power Purchase Agreements (PPA, also called virtual PPA and synthetic PPA) for firms to purchase renewable energy which provides financial security for lending institutions, such as banks, to invest in a renewables project.

Plumseeds / Symbiotics
Plumseeds provides an impact investment portfolio solution for professional investors. The platform offers a selection of Symbiotics' impact bonds, which were previously only available to large investment funds and banks. This means that also accredited professional investors can invest smaller amounts alongside these institutions.

Raisenow
Raisenow is a solution for online fundraising for charities, associations, event organizers, political organizations, and crowdfunding platforms.

Raizers
Raizers provides a digital crowdfunding platform for environmental based investments in real estate.

RepRisk
RepRisk provides an ESG data platform which includes data about more than 150,000 firms worldwide and allows investors to analyze their investments more comprehensively. It allows indepth risk research on companies, infrastructure projects, sectors, and countries, identify the industry-specific material ESG risks.

Selma Finance
Selma Finance is a robo-adivsor that focuses on impact investments based on individual investment choices.

Share&Charge
Share&Charge is an open charging network for electric vehicles based on blockchain. Among other charging related services it offers payment services to the users.

3rd Eyes
3rd Eyes provides a digital platform for financial institutions to deliver goal-based investing with scenario-based asset liability management methods, integrating sustainable investing in the advisory process.

23
yourSRI.com yourSRI's "ESG Fund & Portfolio Screening" solution allows investors to identify the ESG footprint based on evaluations of more than 7,500 firms.

Yova
Yova is an impact investment robo-advisor offering clients to develop and manage more sustainable investment portfolios. A more detailed analysis of the start-ups along the criteria from the literature analysis in section 3 which comprised the provider type, the interaction type, the direct financial processes, the indirect financial processes and the SDGs shows that 22 of the start-ups are FinTechs and only 2 are InsurTechs (provider type, see Table 5). 15 of those are in the German-speaking area, 9 in the French-speaking region. In terms of the interaction type, most start-ups provide their services in b2b (13), followed by b2c (11) and c2c (2). With regard to direct financial processes, most start-ups support investment processes (15), followed by advisory and financing (6), payments, cross-process, non-life insurance (2) and claims management (1). Only 7 start-ups support financial processes also indirectly through processes like mobility, health, education & work, entertainment & communication, shopping & logistics, living and leisure (e.g., e-vehicle charging payment). Finally, the analysis found that most start-ups contribute to the SDG 17 (12), followed by 7 (9), 13 (7), 11 and 15 (5), 12 (4) and 14 (2). In addition to these findings, a more in-depth analysis revealed the following results. Among the examples are BitLumens that is developing a decentralized, blockchain-based micro powergrid, the clean energy platform blueyellow and the digital investment platform Bloomio. This is a clear sign that cross-industry digital ecosystems are only about to emerge, but have not yet emerged as a dominant pattern. Apart from the Green FinTech start-up sector, the analysis also looked at the incumbents and found that some started to implement sustainability metrics in form of climate related measures in their portfolios.
But the analysis of these approaches reveals that those are still very rare (see Table 6) and identified only a handful (13 approaches in total) of "real" Green FinTech and InsurTech solutions compared to the total set of 445 banks and insurance companies that operate in Switzerland. This means that currently under 5% of these firms provide Green FinTech solutions. The analysis of the incumbent solutions reveals three major findings.
First, most of the solutions provided by the incumbents are more frameworks or initial solutions to tap into this new field than comprehensive ones. In contrast to the start-ups, the incumbents cover the climate related SDGs more comprehensively while the former ones focus on isolated SDGs. As  Table 6 summarizes the results of the incumbents' analysis and supports the initial hypothesis that Green FinTech is mostly developed through start-ups as the number of solutions is lower than the start-ups in this field although the total number of banks and insurance companies (246 banks and 199 insurance companies in 2019) exceeds the absolute number of FinTech and InsurTech start-ups in Switzerland.
Banks, insurance companies and other financial institutions mostly try to achieve the SDGs either through green investments or supporting start-ups and technology induced innovations are still rare.

Discussion of the Results
The literature review demonstrated that the total number of papers in this field is still rare. The analysis identified 56 papers from which only 10 papers focused on a general analysis and frameworks for Green products and services, processes, organizational forms or infrastructures (innovation object) and by this supporting specific environmental SDGs (7,11,12,13,14,15,17). However, in sharp contrast to the incumbents, the start-ups already start to offer cross-industry solutions for other sectors like mobility, energy or supply chain finance solutions in various industries which clearly underpins the trend toward cross-industry ecosystems that emerge in the context of digitization.
Finally, the insurance sector is still very weak in providing Green InsurTech solutions. Only two startups and two incumbents currently focus on this topic, although the potential is huge having in mind that risk management for natural catastrophes is a big domain for insurers and re-insurers and calls for more sophisticated solutions including external data sets like weather data, etc.
From an overall perspective, the analysis of the Green FinTech landscape demonstrates big potentials of these novel approaches to alleviate the impact of climate change (see Table 7).

Cross-industry ecosystems
Cross-industry ecosystems which connect Green FinTech services with services from other industries like mobility, energy, logistics, etc. enable completely new application areas like machine-to-machine payments for mobility services, etc.

Data models and transparency
Data driven Green FinTech solutions allow more transparency about firms and value chains as they combine external and internal data sets and thus offer better decision making instruments.

Innovation
Cooperation of incumbents and non-financial institutions that provide innovative Green FinTech solutions enable a higher degree of innovation in this field that for example allow cross-institutional mechanisms and standards. Finally, the analysis of the literature and the Green FinTech landscape leads to conclusions regarding a potential future scenario of the financial services value chain which is mainly driven by new actors entering the competitive landscape and by novel technology solutions complementing them (see Figure   5).
The AS-IS value chain of today is characterized by individual, isolated links from customers to financial institutions. For this customers (b2c) typically use individual interfaces like banking or insurance apps or online banking websites to access the financial institutions' services that operate on core (banking or insurance) solutions. These core applications support all core and partially also support processes of banks and insurance companies like payments, investments, financing, life and non-life insurance as well as procurement, human resources, etc. These core applications are linked to the financial market infrastructure which provides (b2b) services like the stock exchange, clearing and payments consisting of dedicated institutions. All these stakeholders are supervised by regulatory institutions and by central bank institutions ensuring a common level playing field. The Green FinTech development might leads to potential transformations which affect all areas and can be summarized in a TO-BE value chain scenario. This is characterized by four major developments.
First, customers increasingly use c2c business models and common digital interfaces (e.g., SDG-based multi-banking tools based on open finance protocols). Second, the customer processes may either be direct (b2c) financial processes like payments, investments and financing or indirect (b2c) financial processes which support processes in other sectors like retail, mobility, energy, etc. With this, customers can not only access the incumbents' applications, but also non-financial institutions services. Third,

Conclusions
The financial services industry is currently undergoing a major transformation with digitization and sustainability being the core drivers. While both concepts have been researched in recent years independently from each other, the intersection termed as "Green FinTech" has only attracted limited research so far although the field increasingly becomes relevant as Second, a major driver of Green FinTech is the availability, transparency and trustworthiness of data.
For example, if FinTech is applied to sustainable supply chain finance, data from firms have to be trustworthy, so that customers and collaborating providers can be sure that the data is reliable. This also applies to investors. Though, very often today, evaluations of firms are very often based on data from company reports where the source and level of trustworthiness is not transparent. Providers like Bloomberg for example offer data that most often also stem from company websites and reports and, in addition, are often not fully available. In some cases firms provide more data, others less.
International standards for data reporting might in the near future enable a more homogeneous view across different companies and supply chains.
Third, climate change is often regarded as going hand in hand with "ecosystems" in which various stakeholders create a value proposition that exceeds the sum of the contributions from the single parties involved [87]. An example is a blockchain-based sustainable supply chain for agricultural products in which farmers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers and consumers are connected [88]. Another example are energy ecosystems [47,61,89]. In general, a "Business Ecosystem" is defined as an "economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individualsthe organisms of the business world. The economic community produces goods and services of value to customers, who are themselves members of the ecosystem. (…)" [90]. Because ecosystems more and more develop towards digital ecosystems, various design options regarding strategic network types, business models, products / services, processes and organization and system related aspects emerge and have to be considered [91,92]. Thus, Green FinTech solutions are important connectors as they can help to intertwine the stakeholders and processes. An example is a digital smart contract on a blockchain solution for peer-to-peer energy production, distribution and consumption grids.
Fourth, as climate change is an international effort, many solutions require international coordination.
For example, if standardization of and transparency of sustainability data shall be achieved on a global level, institutions from various countries have to be involved. This is especially true in the case of financial data where in some cases security concerns might outperform the sustainability impact. If blockchain technology shall be used for energy production, distribution and consumption or for food supply chains, international coordination is required on a technical and political level which goes far beyond the responsibilities of today's institutions like the UN or others. This might even require the setup of novel institutions like digital notaries to establish such new models.
While this research was limited to Switzerland, additional analyses might focus on other countries or even a global perspective. In addition, Green FinTech can also address solutions of central banks or other financial institutions which were not in the focus of this research, but may also have a significant impact on climate change.

Author Contribution
This research was conducted by Thomas Puschmann, Christian Hugo Hoffmann, Valentyn Khmarskyi, each providing individual contributions: Thomas Puschmann contributed the research framework, the analysis of the start-ups as well as the writing of the overall paper.
Christian Hugo Hoffmann contributed the structure of the paper and the writing of the overall paper.
Valentyn Khmarskyi contributed with the analysis of the start-ups and the literature analysis.

Funding
This research received funding from the Green Digital Finance Alliance for which we would like to thank Marianne Haahr and Katherine A. Foster.