Financial Service and the Cloud: How Carbon Emissions May Be Reduced

Across the globe, billions of financial transactions happen every day, specifically, nearly 369 billion purchases, over 1 billion credit card transactions, and over 319k new credit originations. Because of this sheer transaction volume, sustainability is becoming one of the most important topics for the financial industry and its consumers, and green trends are becoming more essential within the financial services industry. This would be significantly impactful because from 2021 to 2024, transitioning to cloud computing is on track to save at least 629 million metric tons of CO2. According to a survey by Google Cloud, nearly 90% of executives say that they are making a difference in advancing sustainability through their company initiatives.

The cloud can help reduce greenhouse gas in many ways, including the minimization of energy consumption, virutaliation, and eliminating e-waste. The cloud also has the capability to enable a circular economy, which prevents technology byproducts. The migration to the cloud can and will reduce global emissions by a significant amount, and specific cloud services like the Google Cloud are already working towards these goals, with an initiative set to achieve 24/7 carbon-free energy by 2030. Progress on these initiatives is fortunately being made quickly, and many other companies are making the commitment to net-zero emissions, focusing both on improving their services for customers while simultaneously contributing to the goal of reducing environmental impact.

These recent pushes for environmental consideration are one of the most significant steps in the right direction that many companies are taking to ensure that our future is clean and sustainable for years to come. 

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How the Cloud Can Help Reduce Carbon Emissions for the Financial Services Industry