ekko Places Sustainability at the Core of Payments

Oli Cook, CEO & Co-Founder

Financial infrastructure wasn’t built for sustainability. It was built for speed, security, and scale. But that’s changing, fast.

Consumers are asking harder questions about what their money funds. Businesses are under growing pressure to align operations with sustainability goals. And the infrastructure of finance is facing a new challenge: transparency.

ekko, a leading UK-based sustainability fintech, shows that the answer lies in making positive action part of the everyday. Rather than adding another app or tool, they are building environmental intelligence into the transaction layer itself - in the systems that already move trillions of pounds a day.

This article looks at how technology innovation is placing sustainability at the core of the payments journey, and reflects the firm’s business journey and vision for growth in a fast-evolving market. 

Environmental Intelligence 

From banking apps to ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) platforms, ekko’s technology plugs into existing customer journeys and turns ordinary purchases into chances to engage customers on what matters to them. And they’re doing it at scale with some of the biggest global providers already signed up to launch this year. 

“We’re building ekko with a clear goal: to channel $1 billion to environmental organisations,” says co-founder and CEO Oli Cook. “To do that, we built a platform that’s both engaging and invaluable. It blends into the existing flow of payments, but changes what that flow can do. We want ekko to be part of the fabric in finance. Familiar, frictionless, and powerful.”

Their approach is catching attention. In just 12 months, it’s earned recognition across the finance and sustainability sectors. ekko has been named Best New Digital Product by the Global Retail Banking Innovation Awards, a finalist in Product Innovation at the edie Awards 2025, and nominated for the Earthshot Prize 2025. It was also selected to be showcased on the UK Pavilion at COP29, and is part of the prestigious Grow London Global programme.

Catalysing a systems change

Payment companies, fintechs and banks know they have a role to play in achieving our collective climate targets. Many are vocal about their individual sustainability goals and have set internal targets. But tackling climate change takes more than one approach. While institutions work to decarbonise at scale, there’s also a role for solutions that reach people in their everyday lives.

That’s what ekko’s model enables. 

Most sustainability tools ask users to come to them. ekko goes to where users already are.

No new product to launch. No logins to create. No journeys to redesign. Just a timely prompt inside the transaction flow, showing someone the impact of what they’re buying, and offering a way to act.

“This kind of embedded design is crucial,” says Anthony Thomson, ekko board member and founder of Metro Bank, Atom, and 86 400.

“What makes ekko unique is how quietly powerful it is. It works behind the scenes to help major institutions embed environmental education and action into their customer journeys, without disrupting the customer experience.”

It’s a model built for today’s fintech landscape — where platforms win, complexity loses, and anything that slows the user down gets left behind. ekko fits that perfectly: letting clients offer sustainability at scale, without adding cost or confusion.

And for users, the experience stays familiar. One tap. One insight. One small act of repair.

Designed for trust, built for scale

ekko’s tools may be simple to switch on, but under the hood, they’re anything but basic.

Every project funded through the platform is independently vetted. Every contribution is traceable. And every client gets clear, credible reporting they can stand behind.

For businesses, this means zero reputational risk. For consumers, it means confidence that their actions matter.

“People aren’t indifferent,” says Majda Dabaghi, ekko’s Chief Sustainability Officer. “They’re just looking for ways to act that feel real and reassuring. They need to be sure their contribution is impactful. ekko gives them that clarity, and makes the movement feel tangible.”

Dabaghi knows what meaningful change looks like. As co-founder of the SME Climate Hub and a former lead voice for business at major UN climate and biodiversity summits, she’s spent years working at the intersection of ambition and action.

Her view is simple: if we want sustainability to scale, it has to be built into infrastructure that allows for participation from everyone, everywhere.

It’s a shift companies like ekko are helping accelerate.

A hidden force, waiting to be seen

Here’s the paradox: most people care about the planet. Over 80% of people globally say they want to live more sustainably and are willing to contribute to environmental projects. But most of them wrongly believe others don’t.

That gap between what we feel and what we think others feel creates a psychological loop called the ‘spiral of silence’. People care, but assume they’re alone and so any effort they make is futile. The result: they hesitate, wait, and stay quiet. And collective action doesn’t take off, even when the will is there.

ekko helps break this silence by showing users not just their own positive impact, but the collective impact they’re part of. Making climate action visible, communal, and credible.

This gives people confidence that their small choices add up. And that change isn’t just possible, it’s already underway.

This is about unlocking action that was already waiting in the wings. Reconnecting people to a shared sense of possibility. Action that becomes contagious once people see they’re not alone.

And it works: users opt in at meaningful rates and stay engaged over time.

From idea to infrastructure

“We knew that if we wanted to make sustainability part of the financial system, we had to build like a systems company,” says Cook. “That meant investing in the invisible: a seamless API, global-ready design, and the kind of team you’d trust to go live with the biggest names in payments.”

Today, ekko’s infrastructure is built for global scale. Its API supports multilingual deployments across 140+ countries, with the speed and resilience needed to integrate smoothly into platforms handling hundreds of billions in transaction volumes. 

The team now spans the UK, Paris, Cape Town and Australia. A distributed approach that’s as much about quality as it is about geography. “Opening our office in Cape Town has been one of the smartest moves we’ve made,” Cook adds. “It’s given us access to exceptional talent and opened up a new region for the business.”

That focus on trusted partnerships, global readiness and seamless integration has helped ekko to scale quickly with major platforms around the world.

Looking ahead

ekko’s focus is on enabling the clients who already serve millions. When those clients succeed, a billion small actions happen in the background of everyday payments. Not as charity. Not as compliance. But as the new normal.

“We want to help finance lead on sustainability,” says Cook. “Not by adding noise. But by helping the system work better.”

In a sector still figuring out its climate role, ekko offers something rare: a way to lead, without asking users to change a thing.

The clear target is deploying $1bn to impact projects. Over the coming months, that means continuing their rapid global acceleration, opening more regional offices, exciting new product launches, and finding new and inspiring projects to deploy the $1bn to. 

“We’ve set the bar high,” says Cook. “We’re here to shift behaviour at a global scale. The next chapter is about expanding our reach, and deepening our impact.”

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