transforming in a low carbon transition [tilt]. nature positive and equitable.

funded by the EU LIFE programe under the project-name CB-PASTAX

We aim to provide financial institutions with open-source data, methodology and tools to assist and assess SMEs in their journey towards an equitable, nature positive and net-zero future.

tilt is a free, open-source database and methodology to assess European SMEs and their climate profiles.

tilt is an independent venture launched by Theia Finance Labs (formerly known as 2° Investing Initiative Germany). The project is funded by the EU LIFE PASTAX grant, financial institutions, and the philanthropic community.

tilt’s objective

With tilt banks will be enabled to incorporate climate considerations into their lending processes for European SMEs in three ways:

tilt seeks to enable the financial sector to better identify and manage climate transition risk assessment across SME lending portfolios.

Risk
management

01

Climate
engagement

02

tilt can guide banks in engagement activities with SMEs to increase finance for mitigation and adaptation measures, therefore accelerating an equitable, nature positive and net-zero future.

Compliance

03

tilt seeks to drive the adoption of EU regulation (as for example the European Banking Authority pillar 3 disclosures on ESG risks). The data and methodology can help improve the quality, depth and scale of climate disclosures by financial institutions.

tilt and our collaborative approach.
Our partners.

We collaborate with European banks as part of our user group. They contribute to our methodology which will assess the transition, physical and sustainability risks of companies. The contribution of ABN Amro, Banque Internationale à Luxembourg S.A., La Banque Postale, Credit Agricole and ING as User-group banks and road testing partners is of great relevance and assistance in developing appropriate climate assessment methodology for non-listed SMEs.

Starting in October 2021, Theia Finance Labs (formerly 2DII) has developed a database with just over 280,000 SMEs covering 12 climate-relevant sectors and over 20,000 assessed products. We have continued to refine the database and indicators throughout 2023, by road testing different versions of tilt with the aforementioned banks and intend to launch tilt as a web-based tool by mid-year 2024.

We are supported by…

Our work

  • tilt uses a bottom-up approach by assessing small and medium-sized mainly non-listed companies.n doing so, it fills the gap for climate assessment of non-listed companies as currently most data and rating providers focus on listed companies or larger non-listed companies.

  • tilt follows the principle of transparency and tilt provides detailed information on our data sources and the methodology of our indicators which have been developed with the banks.The indicator methodology will be publicly available and free to access.

  • tilt aims to assess climate-relevant information of companies at the most granular level possible. The most granular level we aim for is the product level. Once climate-relevant information is assessed on a product level, we aggregate this product level information to the company level.

  • tilt aims at generating solutions in the most automated way possible, i.e., having solutions that require as little manual input from the banks as necessary.

  • tilt gathers publicly available information from companies, such as information shared from companies on B2B platforms, their websites, and social media. The publicly available information is then matched with other data sources that are open-source or non-commercial.

How to get involved

We have engaged with banks and organisations (such as NGOs, universities and supervisors) throughout this project to ensure the relevance and applicability of the tilt database to financial institutions and the community. To date, a range of European banks and organisations have expressed an interest in the project and are involved as part of a structured engagement. If you are interested in getting involved areas of potential collaboration are:

  • As it progresses to include feedback from the existing bank user-group, new versions of tilt will be released during 2023 and 2024. As a user-group bank you have the opportunity to test the most recent version and indicate what would be most useful to you.

  • Our aim is to enhance tilt to its fullest potential, ensuring its robustness and utility for financial institutions. To achieve this, we're focused on expanding our current coverage and making our models even more robust. Of course, we also have a bunch of ideas in our heads about which kind of indicators and assessments would be nice to add to tilt. If you want to hear more about our plans and are curious to hear how you could support us, please reach out!

  • We are interested in making our methodology as transparent as possible and therefore welcome feedback from financial institutions, research community and NGO sphere. Please let us know if you would like to be part of the tilt community and offer your feedback.

  • We plan for the governance of this programme to be a multi-stakeholder process and funding model. Financial institutions providing general financial support can participate in this governance process which will inform methodology decisions and the long-term programme management. Financial support also helps elevate the quality and scale of the overall project.