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Fair Digital Finance Evaluation Framework

Principle 7: Environmental, Social, Governance

Digital finance companies are committed to environmental responsibility, social responsibility, and corporate governance.

 

  • Company provides rigorous ethics and compliance training.
    • All board members, owners, and employees complete ethics and compliance training annually.
  • Commitment to minimizing the potential of systemic risk.
    • The company maintains a whistleblower program through which employees, volunteers or other staff can report concerns related to how the company’s products or services impact systemic risk, or how products, services, or company behavior negatively impact users’ financial well-being.
  • The company or organization has a commitment to reducing their climate impact.
    • The company or organization is clear about their products’ and services’ climate impact and discloses direct and indirect greenhouse gas emissions.
    • Company develops and discloses GHG emissions target and transition plan.
  • The company or organization transparently shares their climate impact and plan to reduce greenhouse emissions.
    • Company discloses the impact of climate change on the companies’ financial statements.
    • Company shares their climate-related risk management, strategy, and governance.
    • Company shares the details and assumptions back public climate commitments.
    • Company ensures that investors of all sizes have access to data about corporate and portfolio-level climate risk.
  • Diversity (gender, age, ethnicity) of board and staff (management, non-management) is reflective of the target user base of the company.
    • The company publishes an annual diversity report with explicit goals, and publicly shares their progress (or lack of progress) toward meeting past goals.
  • The company commits to maintain the intended functionality of the product for a clearly defined and communicated period of time.
    • The product life cycle is communicated to the potential user before sign-up/registration/account opening.
    • The company will not cease to support the functionality I come to expect during the product life cycle.
    • The company commits that, in the event the company is sold or acquired, the new owner will maintain the intended functionality for the full product life cycle.