Singapore, January 13, 2024 – SC Ventures, Standard Chartered’s innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm, in collaboration with ENGIE Factory, the startup studio of French multinational utility ENGIE Group, are launching Qatalyst, a due diligence platform for carbon finance markets that facilitates efficient and transparent investment processes in support of global climate goals.
“We are partnering with SC Ventures to combine our capabilities and support Qatalyst’s vision of accelerating carbon abatement projects. This transforms the way data is saved and analysed by ensuring it is of high quality, such as recorded consent from indigenous community members for the project to proceed,” said Caroline Guyot, head of ENGIE Factory and board member of Qatalyst.
Incubated and developed in collaboration with carbon teams from both ENGIE and Standard Chartered, Qatalyst aims to simplify and accelerate the identification, due diligence and oversight of carbon abatement projects.
“There are several levels of due diligence that the Qatalyst platform supports,” said Poyan Rajamand, founder of Qatalyst. “We have an enterprise-grade solution that expedites carbon credit project assessments to support objective, transparent data-driven decisions.”
The collaboration with ENGIE Factory and SC Ventures enabled the Qatalyst team to identify pain points and implement solutions to improve investment workflow, manage documentation, exchange information and decision making, while getting first-hand insights from both companies. Qatalyst’s solutions empower investment teams to work more efficiently to evaluate more activity, which could, in turn, potentially lead to more funds being invested into carbon abatement projects.
“Qatalyst is working to ensure the credibility of carbon abatement projects by leveraging new technology such as AI-enabled tools, to help investors understand a project is a sound investment, whilst providing the carbon impact promised,” said Harald Eltvedt, member, SC Ventures, who is also a director of Qatalyst.
