Read the Perseus 2025 Report

Perseus, the UK’s pioneering cross-sector Smart Data scheme, is accelerating towards market deployment with the potential to stimulate a £5-10 billion marketplace for embedded sustainable finance – cutting reporting costs, unlocking SME decarbonisation, reducing carbon intensity, and stimulating new financial innovation. Market-led, pragmatic, and low-friction by design, Perseus stimulates a sustainable future.

In 2025, Perseus continued its rapid evolution:

  • Extending energy coverage from electricity (Scope 2) to include gas (Scope 1) which covers an estimated 70% of market use cases
  • Engaging with both commercial real estate (e.g. sublet offices) and national smart meter roll out energy data sources for both electricity and gas
  • Continued to advance integration with energy data providers Perse, Demand Logic and Smart DCC.
  • Deploying a full sandbox (equivalent to production) for use by Carbon Accounting Providers (CAPs) and Energy Data Providers (EDPs) 
  • Exploring implementations with Sage, Quantaco, Tese, VoltView, Lloyds, and Barclays (e.g. Sage Earth is rolling out to hundreds of thousands of UK SMEs with a Perseus-enabled product)

“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

The programme is now poised for far greater impact as it expands from financing green projects to embedded sustainable finance; integrating trusted, verifiable emissions data directly into accounting and financial decision-making. 

This shift means Perseus can be applied to the whole SME market: including debt financing, debit, credit and savings accounts. In doing so, Perseus has the power to drastically reduce SME reporting costs, unlock capital for energy-efficiency upgrades, decrease carbon intensity across supply chains, and spark a new wave of financial innovation.

“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