Laniakéa, the Franco-Luxembourgish collective of freelancers, is launching the Pareto Eco Project: an ambitious digital platform inspired by the Yuka, Team For The Planet and Reclaim Finance initiatives, designed to accelerate the transition of the global financial system with a view to preserving and restoring biodiversity, including through climate action.
The co-founders are entrepreneurs and consultants specialising in the transformation of large organisations, particularly in platformisation (also known as “Uberisation”).
“Initially, to set ourselves apart from the competition, we wanted to enshrine responsible finance and the requirement to keep our financial flows within “green” banks in our articles of association. We realised that there was no clear benchmark for “green” banks: following Yuka’s example, we therefore created one based on data from Banking On Climate Chaos, a report produced by NGOs on bank financing in the fossil fuel industry. We therefore devised an eco-score that ranks global banks, based on a key principle: that every bank can “go green within three years” in the eyes of its customers. We named this eco-score the Pareto Eco Score, in reference to the 80/20 rule,” explains the founder of Laniakéa.
But this eco-score, developed in Europe, is not enough on its own: it still needs to be rolled out globally, particularly in the countries with the highest carbon emissions.
The collective has thus developed an international digital platform that connects consumers with the companies’ banking partners.
To fund the project, the founders drew inspiration from the French Team For The Planet initiative to raise €1 billion: €10 million over three years to build the entire digital platform, and €1 billion to fund 1,000 start-ups. These start-ups will volunteer to implement the Pareto Eco Score into their customer experiences; they operate in the fields of e-commerce and job boards. The first pilot project, flyerspots.app, is already set up to create a platform for responsible tourism and is open to bold, impact-driven investors at the pre-seed stage.
Freelancers from Laniaké have documented the project in a book entitled “Hope”, with the aim of restoring hope to all those who may have lost it. The book can be downloaded free of charge from the project’s official website. The development of the platform will require expertise from UX designers, product builders, mobile/web developers, and data/AI/API experts, as well as fintech and Web3 specialists: a cryptocurrency to encourage financial transition is indeed part of the plan.
“We have set up a non-profit organisation in France, Pareto Eco 4Life, as well as a special purpose vehicle, Pareto Eco World, the purpose of which is to establish PEP&S, a limited partnership, in Luxembourg, to fast-track the project,” adds one of the co-founders.
A full version of this article is also available in French.