Can a Coffee Buy a Better Planet? ekko Thinks so

What if buying your morning coffee could help fund a kelp forest?

ekko, a London-based sustainability fintech, has embedded this idea into its core technology, making every payment an opportunity for climate action. 

Rather than asking people to download another app or change their spending behaviour, ekko places climate action directly inside the transaction layer of the financial system.

“We want ekko to be part of the fabric of finance, familiar, frictionless, and powerful,” says co-founder and CEO Oli Cook.

Speaking on Profit Meets Purpose, Sustainable Times’ podcast, Cook and his team shared how they’re building a company that turns financial infrastructure into a climate tool, highlighting how transparency and collaboration are critical to success. 

Listen to the full episode here.

From finance to climate

The whole ekko team has a strong background in the financial sector. ekko was co-founded by Cook, formerly of HSBC and Metro Bank, alongside Manish Vara (ex-Lloyds) and Simon Toller (ex-Deutsche Bank), with Anthony Thomson, founder of Atom and Metro Bank, also on the board.

But it was fatherhood that brought the mission into focus. “I wanted to build a future my two daughters would thrive in,” he shared. 

From the outset, the founding team recognised the need for financial infrastructure to support sustainability. ekko’s has a goal to channel $1 billion to environmental projects.

ekko shows users the collective momentum they’re part of. That visibility, Cook believes, is key to breaking the ‘spiral of silence’, a behavioural pattern where people care about sustainability, but wrongly assume others don’t.

“When you realise others are acting too, your own choices feel validated. It becomes contagious,” he says.

Making climate actionable

Unlike most sustainability tools that demand user attention, ekko works behind the scenes. “Most tools ask users to come to them,” Cook explains. “ekko goes to where users already are.”

Whether buying groceries or booking travel, users see a simple message about the environmental impact of their purchase and are offered a chance to take action, like offsetting carbon or recovering plastic waste.

Under the hood, ekko is anything but simple. Every climate project is vetted, every contribution traceable, with every business partner receiving clear, credible reporting. “People aren’t indifferent,” says Majda Dabaghi, ekko’s Chief Sustainability Officer and a former UN climate lead. “They’re just looking for ways to act that feel real and reassuring.”

ekko’s now operates in over 140 countries. Its distributed team spans the UK, France, Australia, and South Africa, where a growing development hub powers the platform’s global capabilities. “Opening our office in Cape Town has been one of the smartest moves we’ve made,” says Cook.

In just 12 months, ekko has gone from prototype to multinational. It has been named Best New Digital Product by the Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards, shortlisted at the edie Awards 2025, and nominated for the Earthshot Prize. The company was also selected to represent the UK Pavilion at COP29, and is part of the Grow London Global accelerator.

The “new normal”

The company’s current focus is executing high-profile launches in collaboration with major banks and other payment services providers. “When our clients succeed, we succeed,” Cook says. “That’s how a billion small actions happen, not as compliance, not as charity, but as the new normal.”

Cook believes this embedded, systems-based, approach will be essential to the future of sustainable finance. “We’re here to shift behaviour at a global scale. The next chapter is about expanding our reach and deepening our impact.”

Listen to the full episode here.

This article is sponsored by Sustainable Wealth Group.

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