Editorial

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At Money20/20 Europe in Amsterdam, Sophia Furber, fintech research analyst, S&P Global, spoke with Richard Theodossiades, founder and CEO of Zero Fintech on how he created a sustainable alternative to banking in the panel session ‘Building a Net Zero Retail Bank’.

The fintech is a neobank focused on climate change that fully launched in the UK in January 2025.

Theodossiades provided statistics on the exponential growth of global temperatures, and how traditional UK banks are still “wedded to making money out of fossil fuel production”. The figure showed that the top five UK banks: Barclays, HSBC, Santander, NatWest, and Lloyds, have contributed billions of dollars since 2023 to fossil fuel production, and hundreds of billions since the Paris Agreement was signed. Barclays topped the list, spending $24.2 billion since 2023 and $235 billion since 2016.

He added: "When I talk to some of those CEOs of those banks, they say to me, ‘We want to do sustainability, but it's going to take us 25 years’ […] We can't wait. The planet can't wait. So that's the problem we're trying to solve.”

Theodossiades highlighted Zero Fintech’s goal of equipping climate-conscious consumers with the tools to make eco-friendly choices in their day-to-day banking. Under-34 year-olds are not only climate anxious, but “actively anxious” Theodossiades explained, which means they are searching for products and services that will relieve this anxiety and protect the planet.

This is where Zero Fintech’s GreenScore comes in. GreenScore is a personal sustainability index that represents customers’ personal sustainability from 0-1000. The data is accumulated by processing transactions on customers’ Zero account (which can also be attached to other bank accounts), analysing the carbon cost of those transactions, and reprocessing it to generate a GreenScore number. The objective of the number is to quantify the user’s carbon footprint, even gamify it in a sense by providing a clean-cut and comparable indicator of how sustainable they are acting, and providing them with the incentive to improve on it.

Theodossiades also mentioned that Zero will be launching Zero Carbon Projects in the near future, an initiative that will offset high carbon emission transactions by allowing users to put money into sustainable and carbon-offsetting projects within the app. The fintech now has 10,000 registered customers at the low cost of acquisition, which proves that there is demand for the product.

Zero Fintech provides a “bank-like experience without actually being a bank”, according to Theodossiades, thanks to significant collaborations in issuance, underlying IBAN accounts, KYC liquidity, transaction monitoring, reconciliation, card manufacturing, open banking activities, and more.

Theodossiades previously founded Wealthify, a digital wealth management platform which offered ESG-focused and ethical investments in their app. Theodossiades aims to build up Zero over time, applying for a banking license in the future to offer more products and services. The app is currently available in the UK to download for free.

“What we really would like to do with Zero as we evolve, is to add pensions and investing products. If we're successful, we should end up with a cohort of millions of climate-conscious, ethical British consumers, and become the go-to place for all the best-in-class climate products,” Theodossiades stated.