How Mobilize Financial Services measures and reduces its financed emissions with Sweep
Company
Mobilize Financial services is an auto finance company
Size
4000+ employees
Industry
Personal Finance
Headquarters
Paris, France
Website
Key takeaways
- Mobilize Financial Services needed to gain a granular understanding of its carbon emissions data, in order to meet corporate reductions targets
- Additionally, Mobilize is required to meet specific regulatory demands of the European Central Bank around financed emissions
- Prior to using Sweep, Mobilize manually collected sustainability data in spreadsheets, a time-consuming and error-prone process
- Mobilize’s sustainability team had trialled an alternative sustainability data management software platform, but found that it did not produce sufficiently high quality data
- Sweep’s “tree” organisation and dashboard data visualisations mean the Mobilize sustainability team can bring its 35 country teams across the world into the data collection process, and keep track of their emissions data in close to real-time
- Mobilize is now able to test different action plans, using Sweep’s reduction simulation features at the corporate level, which are viewable by the country teams
“Sweep has allowed us to save time and energy. We can focus much more on data quality, instead of discussing how to collect the data. Previously we had dozens of spreadsheets all over the place, but now we have won back all of that time”
Virginie Verlynde
Sustainability Manager
Background
Mobilize Financial Services is the financial services provider for Renault Group brands Renault, Dacia, Alpine and Mobilize, as well as for the Nissan brand, and Mitsubishi Motors in the Netherlands, Italy and France. The company offers finance and services addressing both individuals and businesses, buying both new and used cars. In seven countries, Mobilize FS provides savings offers to retail customers; collected deposits then contribute to the car financings the group offers.
Additionally, Mobilize FS finances the activities of car dealer networks of Renault Group, Nissan and Mitsubishi in several countries, assisting them in their daily management to enable them to develop their sales and guarantee their financial sustainability.
Due to its activities, Mobilize Financial Services is under the supervision of the European Central Bank – under the name of RCI Banque S.A. It covers 35 countries, has more than 4,000 employees, and in 2023, it financed the purchase of over 1.2 million vehicles and sold 3.9 million service contracts.
Challenge
Mobilize FS’s sustainability targets are aligned with those of the broader Renault Group: it aims to decarbonize all of its operations worldwide by 2050, with an interim target of 2040 for Europe, across all emission scopes.
As Mobilize’s services are regulated by the European Central Bank, it is subject to specific regulatory demands around financed emissions, known as “Pillar 3”.
The company started where many others do – attempting to calculate its carbon footprint using spreadsheets.
However, the complex structure of the company, and its operations in 35 different countries, meant that the sustainability team was faced with a large amount of disparate data.
Mobilize FS initially worked with another software platform, but reports that the experience was disappointing, failing to allow them to attain the necessary high quality of data, particularly in the reports. Sustainability Manager Virginie Verlynde also notes that she and her colleagues had difficulty in accessing the software.
“Our staff in each of our 35 different countries now input their data directly into Sweep, and can see the impact on our company-wide emissions picture in real time via the platform’s dashboards.
We have also used Sweep’s reduction simulation features at the corporate level to test different initiatives, and these are viewable by our country teams”
Virginie Verlynde
Sustainability Manager
Solution
Mobilize FS benchmarked alternative solutions, and chose Sweep to obtain better data quality, and a higher level of control over its data.
Virginie Verlynde says “Sweep has empowered us to bring all parts of the company into the process, in all the countries where we operate. Each country is in charge of its individual data collection. On the corporate level, this gives us clear oversight of all countries’ data, meaning that we take on a quality control role, rather than spending time collecting data and inputting it into spreadsheets. The country operatives have access to Sweep dashboards and emissions reduction scenarios. This improves our interactions, and makes them as autonomous as possible.”
The teams’ most-used functionalities within the Sweep platform are the measurements and the dashboards. The various countries’ staff input their data directly, meaning that the corporate level team which centralizes the data, can see the real time impact via Sweep’s dashboards.
Mobilize FS has made use of Sweep’s reduction simulation features. At the corporate level, this is used to test different initiatives, which the country teams can view.
Due to Mobilize’s specific business operations, the Sweep team has provided assistance in developing specific simulations.
The biggest success, according to Virginie Verlynde, has been the importation into Sweep of around 5 million lines of data, relating to financed emissions, in order to meet its “Pillar 3” reporting requirements.
Mobilize FS has a large number of bespoke data columns with specific characteristics, particularly those which relate to the vehicles the company finances. Thanks to Sweep, the sustainability teams are now able to use this data, and feed it back to individual country teams.
By the end of 2024, Mobilize FS had put in place all of its action plans pertaining to Scopes 1 and 2, and used the data gathered via Sweep to announce very precise targets related to these, in line with the Science-Based Targets Initiative (SBTI).
For the coming months, the corporate team intends to continue collaborating with its country teams via the Sweep platform in order to go further towards achieving these targets – all while following the reduction results in near real-time.
“Each country is in charge of its individual data collection via Sweep. On the corporate level, this gives us clear oversight of all countries’ data, meaning that we take on a quality control role, rather than spending time collecting data and inputting it into spreadsheets.”
Virginie Verlynde
Sustainability Manager
If, like Mobilize FS, you’d like to accurately measure and reduce your financed emissions, book a Sweep demo
