UBS Group AG, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and seven other banks are providing $45 million in seed capital to a new firm that seeks to facilitate the trading of carbon credits.
(Bloomberg) — UBS Group AG, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce and seven other banks are providing $45 million in seed capital to a new firm that seeks to facilitate the trading of carbon credits.
The banks owning London-based Carbonplace Ltd. also named Scott Eaton as the firm’s first chief executive officer, according to a statement seen by Bloomberg News.
The long-term prospects for the carbon offset market are promising, with supply potentially increasing nearly 60-fold and reaching about $500 billion annually by 2050, according BloombergNEF projections. But the business of trading environmental credits has also been tainted by companies’ use of low-quality offsets to justify claims of carbon neutrality, prompting several privately-led initiatives to work on defining better standards.
Carbonplace is a platform that will “enable customers to learn all the details about the credit they are buying, and to compare it with other credits. This brings a level of price transparency and reference data to the market which has been severely lacking to date,” said Eaton, who previously was CEO at Nivaura, a London Stock Exchange-backed startup. “Over time, we would expect to make available aggregated prices.”
Read more: UBS-Backed Carbon Credit Network Nears 2023 Launch After Test
The other members of the Carbonplace consortium are BNP Paribas, NatWest Group, National Australia Bank, Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, Sumimoto Mitsui and Standard Chartered Plc. Itaú Unibanco is also part of the group, pending of confirmation from the Central Bank of Brazil. Carbonplace platform is expected to launched later this year.
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