Contribution and compensation

Throughout this guide, we use the terms contribution and compensation when talking about impact projects.

Contribution Funding high-quality environmental projects that deliver positive impact — for example, reforestation, biodiversity conservation, or ocean plastic prevention. Contributions are not tied one-to-one with the emissions of a single transaction, but instead support broader sustainability outcomes.

We also use contribution as an umbrella term, covering both contributions and compensations.

Compensation Taking responsibility for the environmental impact of a transaction by directing funds to independently verified climate projects. For example, projects that prevent emissions (like renewable energy) or remove emissions (like reforestation). The goal is to enable individuals and businesses to balance their footprint through credible action, without suggesting that emissions are simply “cancelled out”.

Object hierarchy

ekko uses a simple object hierarchy that mirrors real-world structures. This makes it easy to manage multiple use cases and scale across products.

Organisation

The top-level entity in ekko. An organisation usually represents the client itself (e.g. a payment provider or financial institution).

Brand

A sub-entity within an organisation. One organisation can manage multiple brands — for example, different merchants under a payment provider, or separate entities under a bank.

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Brand owner

For nested relationship structures or when your clients manage their own brands, you can also use the optional brandOwner parameter during onboarding to create a link between various brands.

Product

Each brand can have one or more products. Products define which impact projects are available and how customers can interact with them (e.g. checkout integration, ImpactPay).

Project

A specific sustainability initiative that customers can support. Projects come from certified and trusted organisations such as:

• Gold Standard
• Conservation International
• Conservation Collective
• Tusk
• RSPB
• Prevented Ocean Plastic
• Justdiggit

Find out more about these organisations here.

Examples

Payment service provider

A payment service provider processes payments for multiple merchants. One merchant wants to offer both carbon footprint insights at checkout and an ImpactPay journey post-purchase.

Financial institution

A financial institution offers both an airline co-branded card and its own brand card. Within the own brand, it has a premium and a student option. On the premium card, one tree is planted for every 20 transactions.