The new features are available to all customers at no additional cost.

Increasingly companies want and are required to become more sustainable and transparent about their carbon footprint and sustainability efforts. For example, companies will soon need to comply with legislation such as the UK’s Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting (SECR) and the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). In 2025, it will be the first financial year for which reporting should be done under the CSDR for companies with more than 250 employees, and a €40m net turnover. It is estimated that more than 50,000 companies will need to report Scope 1, 2 and 3 emissions.

Scope 3 emissions - which are all indirect emissions that occur in the value chain, such as business travel, transportation, fuel, or capital goods - are often the largest source of carbon emissions and also the most difficult to track for businesses due to being indirect and hard to govern.

Many businesses now use spend management solutions, such as Payhawk, to control spending and maximise the efficiency of their financial processes. With the release of Payhawk Green, Payhawk customers can automatically quantify the CO2 associated with purchases on Payhawk cards at no extra cost. In addition, Payhawk’s platform can be customised to easily collect and manage Environmental Social and Corporate Governance (ESG) data for suppliers, thereby improving supply chain transparency. Collectively, these features can be used to help businesses comply with new regulations and help support their own ESG initiatives, such as offsetting their emissions.

Hristo Borisov, CEO and Co-Founder of Payhawk says, ‘Through speaking with our customers and our own experience pursuing ESG initiatives, we realised that our product puts us in a unique position to help companies when it comes to sustainability efforts associated with company spending, specifically with regards to the management of Scope 3 emissions. We hope that today’s release of Payhawk Green will help businesses with one component of their broader ESG initiative, and to develop more features in the future that further support our customers.’

To quantify spend-related carbon emissions, Payhawk has integrated with Lune. To maximise accuracy, the Lune platform uses the Greenhouse Gas Protocol estimations, considers product category and value, and uses industry-specific methodologies like the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) for flights or the Global Logistic Emissions Council (GLEC) for logistics. Lune uses thousands of spend-based emissions factors, with global coverage and country-specific data from more than 45 countries.

Erik Stadigh, Co-Founder of Lune says, ‘Whilst sustainability is such a new topic, every company approaches it differently. In light of the new EU regulations, it is something every company needs to consider. Payhawk is helping to pioneer how the spend management space can support businesses with integrated carbon emissions reporting built into it, and does not charge extra for this export.’

As well as supporting its customers through the launch of Payhawk Green, Payhawk is in the early stages of implementing an ESG policy, has tracked its carbon footprint since 2021 and is applying for a sustainability standard.

Hristo Borisov continues, ‘We acknowledge that we can become a more sustainable business and try to balance this objective with our growth ambitions as a young company. We continue to work on our internal ESG initiatives, as well as support our customers on their own journey. We will collect customer feedback on this release of Payhawk Green, and if there is demand add more complimentary features to the platform.’