The data to go beyond spend-based already existed. It was coming in through the wrong door.
Supply-chain carbon was being worked out the usual way: spend times a carbon factor. Factors shared, LCAs shared, spend understood on both sides. But spend is a poor proxy for a lot of what a bank buys, sponsorships, parts of its real estate, resellers, and it leaves footprints wildly over or understated.
Two things were keeping better numbers out of reach. Nobody knew what data actually existed, or where it sat. And suppliers were handing over data blind, with no sight of the footprint being calculated for them or how it was being used. The channel built for sustainability data was the one channel the real data wasn't flowing through.
We followed how the service was actually delivered.
A bank and its suppliers exchange enormous amounts of data just to run the relationship. It moves through operations, billing and delivery, never through the sustainability team. So we stopped asking suppliers for carbon data and started understanding how each service was built and delivered, because that tells you how it's monitored, what gets recorded, and what data already exists.
That reframed the whole exercise, including the deal itself: if a supplier is going to surface data, what do they get back for it? Data as a value exchange, not an ask.
We mapped the data ecosystem, then proved the better data was there.
Working with the client and its suppliers, we traced the data being exchanged across the relationship. With the category teams, we pulled out the spend-based outliers, footprints far too high or too low for the service actually being provided, to show where the method broke and why. Then we proved the alternative: consumption-based data exists across a wide range of product and service categories where nobody was yet using it.
It changed how the supply base was understood, too. An IT reseller, for instance, carries a large footprint in its Scope 3, and it was being treated that way. But most of it is pass-through: the buyer specifies the product, the reseller just moves the transaction. They handle the carbon, they don't own it. Seeing that tells you where you can pull a lever and where you're wasting effort.
Key categories moved from a spend proxy to real consumption data.
Client and suppliers could finally see what existed and where it lived.
Pass-through categories understood for what they are, so effort lands where it can actually move something.
The start of a value exchange, suppliers getting something back for what they share.