Read the Perseus 2025 report

At the Perseus 2025 AGM it was reported that Perseus is:

  • evolving from ‘financing green’ to embedded sustainable finance creating a potential addressable market of £5-10 billion
  • adding gas, extending energy coverage from Scope 2 (electricity) to Scope 1
  • estimated, via its existing members, to have potential reach of over 1 million UK SMEs and cover over 70% of use cases
  • continuing to advance ‘Perseus Ready’ implementations with commercial members
  • running a live sandbox (equivalent to production) for use by Carbon Accounting Providers (CAPs) and Energy Data Providers (EDPs) to develop solutions
  • working with Perseus members to develop go-to-market capabilities to support hundreds of thousands of SMEs
  • exploring integration with Open Banking to enable cross-sector interoperability
  • producing XBRL outputs to enable integration with financial reporting systems
  • pioneering the development of a voluntary, cross-sector Smart Data scheme, aligned with the UK Data Act and supported by an openly-licensed digital public infrastructure (DPI) architecture for secure data sharing 

“Perseus makes it easier for everyone to do their carbon calculations properly, and comfortably moves us years ahead of the most stringent proposed updates to the GHG Protocol. This is exactly why Sage intends to roll out a Perseus enabled product to make reporting easier for hundreds of thousands of UK SMEs.”

George Sandilands, Vice President, Sage Earth

From financing green to embedded sustainable finance

For much of the last decade, ‘green finance’ has focused on funding individual projects: a retrofit here, a solar installation there. Important, but limited. 

Perseus marks a shift to something far more systemic: it moves beyond financing green to embedding sustainable finance by integrating trusted, verifiable emissions data directly into everyday accounting and financial decision-making.

This evolution means Perseus can be applied across the whole SME market, not just specialist green products. Rather than expecting SMEs to seek out solutions themselves – something most lack the time or expertise to do – Perseus brings trusted insights to where they are (e.g. inside their existing accounting, banking and carbon applications). 

Perseus can support lending, credit and debit products, and even savings accounts, allowing sustainability performance to be reflected wherever financial decisions are made. The impact on SMEs is significant: personalised insights, lower reporting costs, easier access to capital for energy-efficiency upgrades, and new space for financial innovation. By making sustainability data usable at scale, Perseus aims to help turn ‘net zero’ from a niche ambition into a normal feature of how the economy works.

“As a leading smart data initiative, Perseus is developing guardrails for assurable data to support finance and supply chain decisions towards a sustainable economy.”

Hannah Gilbert, Director of Sustainability, British Business Bank