US sustainable financial company Aspiration has launched a new feature that would provide an overall assessment to where people spend their money.
The mobile banking app, called Aspiration Impact Measurement (AIM), analyzes thousands of data points whist providing two different types of results.
The ‘People’ score shows the way employees are being treated by their employers, whereas the ‘Planet’ score unveils the companies’ sustainability, ethical impact and environmental practices.
Hence, each time an Aspiration user swipes his debit card funneled to his account to make a payment toward a company, the People and Planet scores of the aforementioned company are channeled to the user’s personalized AIM score that reflects the positive or negative impact of the way he spends his cash.
“People have been hungering for this exact kind of information,” Andrei Cherny, CEO of the ethical financial firm Aspiration says.
“We see this in our customers, we see this in all these surveys that are coming out about how younger people especially, but consumers overall, are thinking about how a company behaves and how its products are created as they make decisions on where to buy. But until now, they haven’t really had the information to be able to do so,” Cherny further adds.
Aspiration has gained worldwide recognition for democratizing access to banking and taking an ethical approach to investing. The company offers a “pay-as-you-wish” model that allows customers to give Aspiration whatever amount they feel reflects the firm’s performance, including USD 0.
More than 85% of customers choose to pay, and Aspiration puts 10% of what it earns toward financing microloans for underserved populations, particularly immigrant women.
The app translates Aspiration’s “Do Well, Do Good” ethos into everyday consumerism. Aspiration worked with private data analyzers that dig into companies’ public reports and private data to craft an analysis of their practices, mainly for use by large hedge funds and investment firms.
The ‘People’ category features metrics like the percent of women and minority employees and the spread between CEO earnings and those of entry-level workers, while the ‘Planet’ category features measurements like greenhouse gas emissions and the amount of waste sent to landfill.
Read more at FastCompany.