Why banks struggle to integrate green products and how to get it right

People are demanding more from banks. Not just better rates or digital services, but sustainable solutions. In fact, half of consumers want their bank to offer tools that support more sustainable choices, whether that’s understanding their carbon footprint or helping make their homes more energy-efficient to lower energy bills and emissions.

Banks are responding to this demand, integrating green products and services, including carbon insights, home energy tools and green rewards and grants, into the banking experience. Yet, many solutions are failing to gain traction and deliver tangible impact for both customers and the bank. So where’s the disconnect?

Embedding sustainability into the core customer journey

In many banks, sustainability is still handled by separate teams, often disconnected from core product, digital, and commercial functions. This separation limits opportunities to embed green thinking into everyday banking experiences, where it has the most potential to influence behaviour and deliver impact. 

This fragmentation shows up in the customer journey too. Home energy tools and sustainability hubs are often isolated in separate sections of the app or website, away from the main transaction feed, making them easy to miss and hard to engage with in the right moment.

However, retrofitting a home or switching to a greener lifestyle isn’t a one-click decision. These are significant, high-commitment decisions that require time, awareness and carbon literacy. That’s why it’s essential to surface green tools regularly and in context. The more these tools are embedded into users’ day-to-day financial journeys, the more likely they are to engage and take action.

These tools also work better when they’re connected. For example, if a customer sees the carbon footprint of their energy bills, that’s the perfect moment to link them to a home energy tool or retrofit offer. This helps create a joined-up, empowering experience, one that helps users build confidence and momentum in their sustainability journey.

Laying the foundations for personalised solutions

Many banks recognise the value of delivering more integrated, personalised sustainability journeys, but legacy systems often get in the way. Traditional banking infrastructure wasn’t designed to handle complex data sets, particularly behavioural or environmental data. As a result, it’s difficult to connect customers’ financial activity with relevant sustainability insights in a meaningful, timely way. 

Driving engagement through personalised, timely insights

To truly engage customers, banks need to personalise the sustainability journey. By using spending data to estimate the carbon emissions of individual actions, banks can surface tailored recommendations that help users reduce their footprint. When integrated directly into the transaction feed, these insights become part of the everyday banking experience—timely, relevant, and easy to engage with. This not only builds carbon literacy but also drives further interactions, increasing dwell time as users explore lifestyle-based actions they can take. 

Crucially, this opens up natural pathways to link other tools and products. For example, a customer who sees high emissions from home energy use could be seamlessly directed to home energy tools or green financing options. While users who commit to taking lower-carbon actions might be rewarded in real-time through green rewards, reinforcing positive behaviour. Beyond improving the user experience, this also unlocks commercial value, increasing opportunities for banks to upsell and cross-sell green products in ways that feel helpful, not pushy.

Partnering with fintechs for speed and scale

Building personalised and integrated sustainability experiences can be complex, especially when working with legacy systems, but banks don’t have to do it alone. Fintech partners can help banks overcome infrastructure and capability gaps by offering ready-made platforms and APIs that embed seamlessly into existing digital journeys. These partnerships allow for banks to move faster, innovate more easily, and meet rising customer expectations without starting from scratch. 

How Cogo can help your bank drive engagement and value

Cogo helps banks seamlessly embed sustainability into everyday banking. Our Carbon Insights solution uses transaction data to estimate customers’ carbon footprints and surface personalised, real-time recommendations.  

By integrating these insights directly into the core digital journey, we help banks move beyond static sustainability content or siloed hubs, and instead offer a dynamic experience that builds carbon literacy, deepens engagement, and drives meaningful action, all while increasing dwell time, trust, and cross-sell opportunities. 

Our home energy tool goes even further, identifying households with high energy emissions and surfacing tailored retrofit advice and green financing options, supporting your sustainability goals, enhancing the digital value proposition and driving more uptake of green finance solutions. 

Whether you’re looking to de-risk your portfolio or simply engage customers in more meaningful ways, Cogo provides the infrastructure and insights to make it happen.

Ready to build a better banking experience? Let’s talk.