Customer Story: Green Places—streamlining sustainability-as-a-service

Problem: Green Places relies on customers’ HR data to perform key carbon footprint calculations. To get what it needs, Green Places had to ask customers to upload the data via spreadsheets and CSV files—a high-friction, time-consuming, and low-fidelity process.

Solution: By integrating with Finch, Green Places has direct, secure, and permissioned data connectivity to 90% of the HR platforms its customers use every day—saving customers 5 to 7 hours at onboarding and unlocking new possibilities for Green Places’ product roadmap.

Collective action against climate change

It has never been more critical for businesses to minimize their environmental impact, but traditional pathways to assessing and reducing a business’ carbon footprint are, for many businesses, prohibitively expensive.

Green Places is changing that. Through its tech-first, science-backed approach to calculating, reducing, and offsetting emissions, Green Places is making sustainability attainable, so that businesses of all sizes have the power and opportunity to make a difference.

A friction-filled onboarding flow

To arrive at accurate emissions calculations, Green Places taps into many different kinds of data sources, including utility companies, databases managed by the Environmental Protection Agency, Google Maps, business accounting systems, and more.

One of Green Places’ most important data sources is the HR platforms its customers use to manage their human capital. HR platforms house many of the keystone data attributes Green Places depends on, including the number of employees a customer has, where each employee is based, and the location of their workspace. When combined with data from other sources, Green Places can determine important markers like how much clean energy versus fossil fuels a customer expends to power its physical operations and the total environmental impact of its employees’ commute.

But without direct connectivity to HR platforms, Green Places had to ask its customers to upload their HR data manually via spreadsheets and CSV files. It was tedious, time-consuming, and compromised Green Places’ mission to put seamless sustainability within reach.

The impact of connectivity

Green Places knew it had to automate the data retrieval process and set a goal of pulling 80% of emissions data across all source types. But when it came to HR data, Green Places found that most integration providers lacked breadth and depth of coverage. The sustainability platform was about to embark on a piecemeal initiative to cobble together multiple partial solutions, when it learned about Finch.

Above all, Green Places was impressed with Finch’s comprehensive coverage. With Finch’s single, universal API, Green Places gained real-time connectivity to more than 90% of its customers’ HR platforms. Just as critically, Finch affords Green Places more time and bandwidth to allocate to other areas of product development.

"We’ve always had the goal of making our product as straightforward as possible through integrations. So, now that we have a universal integration into HR platforms through Finch, we can devote our time to focusing on unlocking commerce data and other data silos."

Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO

Where Finch fits in

Since partnering with Finch, customers have the option to securely connect their HR platform directly to Green Places’ system. From start to finish, the connection takes moments:

1. Customers select their HR platform from the options provided.
2. They sync their account and permission the data transfer by passing their credentials through Finch's secure, compliant, and white-labeled Connect modal.

Instantly, via a single API integration, Green Places has access to the data it needs to perform 40% of a customer’s emissions calculations. Meanwhile, customers are spared anywhere from 5 to 7 hours they would otherwise spend manually collecting and uploading HR data.

Fueling future innovation

Finch also opens up a world of potential for the sustainability platform.

Traditionally, carbon accounting is based on historical data, but with Finch’s live data connection, Green Places is uniquely positioned to upend the status quo and build carbon accounting services that are based on real-time computations.

Green Places is also planning to leverage Finch’s comprehensive HR endpoints, including employee email addresses, to fuel a higher degree of employee interaction. The goal is to foster authentic sustainability cultures within workplaces that influence systemic change.

"With Finch, we have the opportunity to make sustainability and green policies core to employees’ work experience, so that change doesn’t just happen at the top; it comes from all directions."

Alex Lassiter, Green Places’ Founder and CEO

At Finch, we’ve made it our mission to support innovative platforms like Green Places access the global employment ecosystem. If you’re interested in learning more about the potential and power of workforce data, enter your email address on our homepage here to get API keys today.