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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter May 16, 2022

Sustainable Finance and Fintech: Can Technology Contribute to Achieving Environmental Goals? A Preliminary Assessment of ‘Green Fintech’ and ‘Sustainable Digital Finance’

  • Eugenia Macchiavello and Michele Siri

The Digital Finance/Fintech Action Plan and the Sustainable Finance Strategy both represent important pillars of the current EU policy agenda. Nonetheless, the two areas have been treated as separate for a long time, while they present certain common features and great potential when combined. In particular, Fintech appears able to respond to some shortcomings in the current sustainable finance framework (e. g. access to retail financing, ESG disclosure, verification and ratings, etc.). The relevance of the link between sustainability, finance and technology has also been evidenced by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, which has urged all countries to re-think the models traditionally deployed and rely more on technology and sustainability. However, Fintech/digital finance still raises per se relevant technical and legal issues that need to be addressed to fulfil its promises and potential in the sustainable finance sector. The present paper aims at starting a debate about “Green Fintech” in order to effectively connect the two worlds and spur the research in such a new and promising area. Special attention will be also reserved to the recent proposal for a European Single Access Point for corporate financial and non-financial disclosure.


Note

While this paper is the result of shared discussions, paragraphs 1, 3 and 4 should be attributed to Eugenia Macchiavello, while paragraph 2 to Michele Siri, and paragraph 5 to both Eugenia Macchiavello and Michele Siri. This version of the paper was finalised on 30 September 2021: subsequent developments could not be taken into account. The present contribution represents a re-elaboration and update of the previous working paper: Eugenia Macchiavello and Michele Siri, ‘Sustainable Finance and Fintech: Can Technology Contribute to Achieving Environmental Goals? A Preliminary Assessment of ‘Green FinTech’ (August 13, 2020), European Banking Institute Working Paper No. 71/2020, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3672989. We are grateful to the ECFR anonymous referees as well as organizers, discussants and participants of the following conferences for their useful feedback: ‘2nd Geneva-Zurich Seminar Series on Sustainable Finance: Sustainable Finance and Digitalisation’, 25 March 2021; ‘ERA Annual Conference on Law and Sustainable Finance’ 26 May 2021.; ‘ERA Annual Conference on Law and Financial Innovation’, 16 September 2021.


Published Online: 2022-05-16
Published in Print: 2022-05-12

© 2022 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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