Sugi is a platform for you to understand the carbon impact of your investments and take action to improve it. We’re not a broker, asset manager or investment adviser.
We provide factual information relating to the carbon impact of your current investments, which should not be treated as any form of financial, investment or other professional advice or recommendation. We also do not provide you with any invitations or inducements to engage in investment activity.
The platform itself (including all our metrics) is completely free to use. As an additional service, we're excited to offer users the ability to offset some or all of their portfolio by purchasing verified carbon credits via the Sugi app. Check out the carbon offsetting FAQs below for more details.
We want Sugi to be a gateway for you to curate your own green portfolio - without needing to leave your existing investment platform or set up a separate green investment account. And we have so many plans for achieving that!
On launch, Sugi enabled investors to check the carbon impact of their holdings and compare with similar investments. Then we released a feature allowing users to monitor the global warming potential of their portfolios, all firsts for UK retail investors. Now, we also offer carbon offsetting, to you can take positive climate action, whatever the impact of your underlying portfolio.
We will keep want to bring you even more data, to give you the fullest environmental picture of your investments, and make it easier for you to improve your impact without leaving the app. The features we launch will be guided by you. So if you want to suggest features or give feedback on the app, we’d love to hear from you.
No, because Sugi is not carrying on any activities that are regulated by the FCA.
Sugi brings you factual impact information about your investments. We don’t advise on investments, arrange investments, make investments on your behalf or do any other regulated activity. The benchmarks (industry and market averages) we provide on the Sugi app are not regulated because they are not used to calculate the value of financial instruments.
Nothing on the Sugi app or website should be treated as any form of financial, investment or other professional advice or recommendation, and you shouldn’t use or rely on any content within the Sugi app as the basis for making any financial decision. We also do not provide you with any invitations or inducements to engage in investment activity.
If in doubt, you should speak to a suitably qualified adviser.
To change your password, tap on your name in the sidebar to access your profile settings.
Sugi is currently only available for iPhone.
Sugi is currently only available for iPhone.
When you select your investment platform on Sugi, you’ll be taken to a login page powered by a company called Moneyhub, a market-leading Open Finance data provider. Logging in allows you to share some of your investment information with Sugi so we can create personalised impact reporting for you. It’s a read-only service and neither Sugi nor Moneyhub has any access to your investment platform, nor are your login details saved.
Once you successfully access your investment information on Sugi, you’ll see a green tick next to your investment platform name. You can disconnect your investment platform at any time by tapping on the platform name and confirming that you want to disconnect.
Instead of (or as well as) connecting an investment platform, you can add individual investments manually via our 'manual entry' function.
No, Sugi does not have access to your investment platform login details.
Moneyhub is a market-leading Open Finance data, intelligence and payments platform. It is regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and its team is heavily involved in regulation and best practice in the industry - including as members of The Financial Data and Technology Association, The Pensions Dashboard Industry Delivery Group and the FCA Regulatory Sandbox. Moneyhub’s CTO is a UK expert at the International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), working on a global standard for financial APIs.
As a Sugi user, you don’t need a Moneyhub account. Moneyhub simply provides the technology to connect you with data from your investment portfolio on the Sugi app.
Yes, you can link multiple investment platforms. If you can’t see your investment platform on the list, let us know and we’ll try to add it to our database.
You can also add individual investments manually via our 'manual entry' function.
You can tap on the green tick next to your investment platform name on the Sugi app and it will disconnect your portfolio. All of your investment data will be deleted from our database within minutes.
No, Sugi is not a trading platform.
Every three months, you'll be prompted to re-enter your login details as part of the security protocols to keep your data safe.
We hold your name and email address. We also hold limited information about your investments - the name of the investments and their value - just enough to create personalised impact reporting for you. We also hold data about how you use the Sugi app and our services. For more information, please read our app Privacy Policy, which you can find in the Settings tab of the app.
We take data protection very seriously and deploy rigorous systems to keep your data safe at all times. Your data is encrypted while in transit and at rest, and our cloud servers are secured by industry-standard AWS RDS encryption. Please read our app Privacy Policy, which you can find in the Privacy section of the sidebar.
No. Once you delete your account, all your data is removed from the Sugi servers within minutes.
We do not and will not sell your data.
Sugi calculates the impact of around 99% of the global listed equities market by market capitalisation and tens of thousands of ETFs, actively managed funds and investment trusts. This includes fixed income investments, such as bond ETFs and bond mutual funds.
We don’t currently cover certain alternative asset classes, such as commodities.
Sugi tells you the annual carbon impact of each investment in absolute numbers (for example, 500kg), and it compares your impact with a relevant average.
For company stocks, Sugi calculates the average impact of the company’s industry. For funds, ETFs and investment trusts, Sugi creates a weighted average on the basis of their holdings.
A green cloud means that your investment has a lower carbon impact than the average. A red cloud means that your investment has a higher carbon impact than the average. You can learn more about how your investment compares with the relevant average by tapping on the investment for an expanded view.
The carbon impact of your investment is important, but it’s useful to know whether your investment is better or worse than average. So for each one of the stocks you own, Sugi creates a benchmark, which represents the average impact of an investment in the same industry.
For example, if you hold a stock in a bank, this tells you how it compares with the banking industry as a whole. For funds, ETFs and investment trusts, Sugi creates a weighted average on the basis of their holdings.
Yes, you can tap on the 'sort' icon in the top right of your investment list to organise your investments according to impact in ascending or descending order.
Yes, you can! Within the app sidebar you can select which of your connected portfolios you want to view.
The Sugi forest is a visual representation of the carbon impact of your portfolio. There are different levels of forest depending on the proportion of red and green clouds in your portfolio. The greater your proportion of green clouds, the more alive and verdant your forest. If you can see four birds in the sky, you've achieved the best forest - well done! But of course there's always more work to do...
Sugi brings you factual information about the carbon impact of your investments. We don’t provide investment advice any information on the carbon impact of your investments should not be treated as any form of financial, investment or other professional advice or recommendation, and you shouldn’t use or rely on any content within the Sugi app as the basis for making any financial decision. If in doubt, you should speak to a suitably qualified adviser.
The information you find on Sugi differs from ESG/sustainability ratings in various ways.
An ESG/sustainability rating generally scores a fund out of five. It’s created by averaging the ESG scores of the underlying companies in the fund and comparing the fund with others in the same industry group.
The underlying companies are rated using a highly subjective methodology, combining environmental, social and governance factors, with a bespoke set of weightings for each factor, determined by the agency that creates the rating. A different set of factors is used depending on the industry, so you can’t compare ratings across industries.
Since ESG/sustainability ratings combine different types of impact (i.e. environmental, social/ethical and governance), it’s difficult to research investments based on their green credentials. They also don’t take account of the specific value of an investment (its ‘weighting’) in your portfolio. So you could have a small investment with a high sustainability rating and a larger investment with a low sustainability rating, and it would not be obvious how your portfolio performs as a whole.
Finally, ESG/sustainability ratings are a financial risk metric - they calculate the extent to which environmental, social and governance issues affect a company's economic value. So they don't give you absolute information about how a company performs environmentally.
Sugi offers an objective measure of the carbon impact of your investments and the quantity of carbon for which you are responsible as an investor and an owner of each company.
We source our company-level emissions data from S&P Global Trucost, a world leader in environmental data and analysis. Trucost has been supporting investors since 2000, and it maintains the world’s largest impact data set - almost 20,000 publicly listed equities (around 99% of global market capitalisation), across 464 industry sectors, with over 100 environmental key performance indicators.
Trucost uses published environmental reporting with an overlay of proprietary economic modelling to determine a company’s true carbon impact across its own operations and across its entire global supply chain, both upstream and downstream. Trucost engages with all of the companies in its database to verify their environmental performance profile and collect any relevant unpublished data. For more information, visit trucost.com.
Each company you invest in has its own carbon impact - which comes from its business activities, electricity use, supply chain and customer behaviour. The carbon impact of a fund (or ETF) is the impact of companies that make up the fund. As a shareholder (or bondholder) in a public company, you own (or finance) a small portion of the company and also a small portion of the carbon emissions that the company creates.
If you have 1kg of carbon impact, this means that the company in your portfolio has emitted an amount of greenhouse gases equivalent to 1 kilogram of carbon dioxide (more scientifically, ‘CO2e’).
It’s a great question, and one we’ve given a lot of thought. In fact, we’ve written a whole blog on it. Check it out! Does your portfolio cost the earth?
Carbon impact refers to the amount of carbon emissions that is attributed to a particular investment. This information is important, but it’s also quite abstract. We want to make our metric meaningful, something you can relate to. So we equate an investment’s carbon emissions to chopping down a number of trees. On average, a tree lives for 30 to 50 years and absorbs 115–150kg of carbon dioxide during that time. Chopping it down leaves that carbon in the atmosphere. Because our carbon impact data is calculated annually, our metric is based on how much carbon dioxide the average tree absorbs on an annual basis: around 3kg.
We source our carbon impact data from S&P Global Trucost, a world leader in environmental data and analysis. Trucost’s data updates throughout the year as companies around the world report their carbon data in their annual reports and sustainability reports.
We refresh our impact data weekly to make sure you benefit from the latest research. We update the contents of your portfolio when you first connect your portfolio, and then each time you open the app. For more information about our data, check out this FAQ: Where do you get your data from?
We source our carbon impact data from S&P Global Trucost, a world leader in environmental data and analysis. This data covers a year of a company’s activities. For more information about our data, check out this FAQ: Where do you get your data from?
Not yet, but we want to include this in the platform soon.
Carbon offsetting is the purchase of carbon credits to rebalance carbon emissions. Each credit represents one tonne of carbon emissions saved from the atmosphere.
Businesses purchase carbon credits to rebalance emissions they’ve generated directly through their operations or indirectly through their supply chains; people purchase carbon credits to rebalance the carbon impact allocated to them via their everyday activities, purchases and investments.
Carbon credits can be generated by tree-planting and conservation projects. Since trees absorb carbon (around 115–150kg during a 30–50 year lifespan), their planting and protection represents carbon saved from the atmosphere. Not every conservation or tree-planting project generates carbon credits, and projects must meet many criteria to be properly certified.
Sugi’s mission is to help everyday investors make greener choices. Plug your portfolio into Sugi and you can see its carbon impact, as well as its global warming temperature; check the impact of each investment and whether it’s better or worse than the industry average; and compare with similar investments in the market.
You can use this information to better understand your own impact and identify greener investments. At the same time, there may be valid reasons to maintain your exposure to higher carbon investments. With offsetting, you can rebalance your portfolio’s impact while greening up your investments in other ways.
Importantly, offsetting doesn’t let companies off the hook. The pressure remains on individual companies to decarbonise their operations, and your offsets don’t count towards any net zero commitments they have made.
We have partnered with Ecosphere+ to deliver our offsetting service. Ecosphere+ is a natural climate solutions business, which has developed the world’s leading portfolio of forest-based voluntary carbon projects.
The current project chosen by Sugi, the Tambopata-Bahuaja Biodiversity Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon, protects 600,000 hectares of forest, restores 4,000 hectares of degraded land, protects 30 key species and collaborates with local communities to achieve sustainable economic development, including meeting 11 UN Sustainability Development Goals.
The carbon credits available through Sugi are accredited by Verra’s
Verified Carbon Standard, the world’s most widely used voluntary
greenhouse gas certification programme. This certification demonstrates
that carbon emissions really are reduced and the underlying project
delivers lasting climate benefits.
In addition, the project chosen by Sugi is certified by the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance to the Gold Standard, representing excellence in the areas of biodiversity and climate change adaptation.
The credits are listed on an international register. Once purchased, they are retired and can never be bought by anyone else. That means there’s no double counting of these credits anywhere in the world.
The carbon credits you purchase offset some or all of your portfolio’s carbon emissions for one year. We show this in the app as an amount of offsets in tonnes and as a percentage of your portfolio’s impact.
Your portfolio temperature, on the other hand, is a more complex and longer term metric. It’s a measure of how much the underlying companies in your portfolio are reducing their emissions in line with sector-allocated carbon budgets in the lead-up to 2050.
While offsetting your portfolio on an annual basis makes a tangible difference to carbon in the atmosphere, it is not tied to the temperature path of your portfolio companies.
Carbon offsetting is not an investment. The carbon credits available via the Sugi app are certified units that represent carbon saved from the atmosphere, which Sugi purchases on your behalf. They are not tradable, transferable or redeemable, and there is no financial return when you offset your carbon impact.
