Northern Trust Developing Digital Platform for Institutional Voluntary Carbon Credit Transactions

Northern Trust (Nasdaq: NTRS) announced today it has completed the first stage toward an industry-wide voluntary carbon credit ecosystem that would allow institutional buyers to digitally access carbon credits from leading project developers.

The announcement follows Northern Trust’s successful milestone of completing fully automated transactions on the initial minimum viable product (MVP) digital carbon credit platform it has developed with carbon avoidance and removal project developers including Go Balance Limited, ReGen III (TSXV: GIII) and a direct air capture company in addition to institutional buyers.

The ecosystem utilizes private ledger digital blockchain technology to connect institutional buyers with carbon credit suppliers who are focused on solutions to reduce greenhouse gases including carbon dioxide. The fully digital platform allows purchasers to transact tokenized carbon credits directly with project developers and retire these against their carbon footprint.

Pete Cherecwich, president of Asset Servicing at Northern Trust, said: “This new development from Northern Trust’s Digital Assets and Financial Markets team represents a significant milestone toward delivering a market-leading platform able to support a diverse range of digital assets. Allowing institutional clients to access carbon credits and doing our part to help these firms along their carbon offsetting journey is important for the future.”

Justin Chapman, global head of Digital Assets and Financial Markets, at Northern Trust, said: “The use of digital technology to manage the lifecycle of carbon credits gives both the buyer and project developers confidence and transparency through the lifecycle of their voluntary carbon credit transactions.”

Ciaran Kelly, chief executive officer at Go Balance Limited, said: “Northern Trust’s approach to digitizing the voluntary carbon credit market has the potential to enable project developers such as Go Balance Limited to enhance our focus on initiatives to avoid deforestation by streamlining time consuming administration tasks. The solution will make it easier for all participants to track, manage and transact the registry of carbon credits, whilst also delivering full transparency to the end-to-end lifecycle of a voluntary carbon credit.”