Octopus Group are one of the most innovative and ambitious companies in the finance and energy sectors. As part of this innovation and ambition Octopus Group saw an opportunity to improve how they calculate their own carbon footprint and the footprint of their investments.

Minimum and Octopus Group worked together to implement Minimum’s bespoke tech solutions to improve the data collection, emissions calculations, and progress tracking. This project has allowed Octopus Group to create a strategic roadmap to become a Net Zero company by 2030.

The Story of Octopus

Octopus are one of the most disruptive and progressive companies in the financial services and energy sectors. They have more than 2,500 employees serving 2.5 million customers. Their renewable energy business is disrupting a £2 trillion industry by using technology to make the green revolution faster and cheaper for tens of millions of customers. The investment business is using their expertise, and billions of pounds of investors’ assets, to help build a brighter future. Octopus have set a target of becoming Net Zero by 2030. This will require significantly reducing their own emissions as well as the emissions of the companies they invest in.

The opportunity for Octopus to automate their carbon emission calculation and tracking

To become a Net Zero organisation by 2030, Octopus needed a way of accurately calculating a baseline carbon footprint for their own operations and the footprints of the companies they invest in. For a company with a complex business model and many portfolio companies there is a significant challenge in collecting the data, turning this into a carbon footprint and then tracking the footprint over time. 

Minimum’s solution helped Octopus in numerous ways:

• Minimum helped set up internal processes to collect data through its tech platform. This helped assign data collection responsibilities and tracked which data was outstanding.
• Using Minimum’s web-based data collection tooling, Octopus was able to collect the emissions from all of Octopus’ venture investments in record time, with ease. 
• Our tech to automated the calculation and tracking of Octopus’ own operational emissions and the emissions of larger portfolio companies. 
• Minimum’s results and reporting dashboard allowed Octopus to analyse their footprint on a regular basis and develop a strategic carbon reduction roadmap. 

Why Octopus Chose Minimum

As more and more companies recognise the climate crisis and start setting ambitious Net Zero targets the challenges of accurately and efficiently calculating a carbon footprint are becoming apparent. 

Minimum combine their bespoke tech solutions and access to carbon footprinting experts to create a compliant baseline footprint and then automate the data collection and footprint calculation processes to provide deep insight into their own operations, their supply chain, or portfolio companies.  

These results can then be updated through automated processes on a regular basis once the initial baselining has been conducted. This allows organisations to effectively engage with all stakeholders, develop effective targeted carbon reduction plans, all on their journeys to Net Zero.

The Results

Octopus now have a bespoke software solution which enables them to aggregate data from multiple sources and organisations to create a full carbon footprint across their whole value chain. The results and reporting dashboard developed by Minimum allows Octopus to:

• Effectively track emissions with deep insight into emission hotspots. 
• Focus carbon reduction initiatives on the areas of the business model which will lead to more material impacts.
• Communicate progress to all stakeholders from external investors/shareholders to environmentally minded colleagues.