FinTech and the Identification of Green Financing: The Alternative Data Value of Enterprise Carbon Accounts

Abstract

As digital finance and the green transition advance in parallel, financial institutions face a growing need to identify firms’ green attributes and the quality of their low-carbon transition. However, traditional financial statements, collateral, and static credit information often fail to adequately capture corporate carbon performance, giving rise to persistent problems in green financing, including information asymmetry, high identification costs, and greenwashing risks. From a FinTech perspective, this paper conceptualizes enterprise carbon accounts as a form of alternative data infrastructure in the context of green finance and examines their functions and limitations in the identification of green financing. Drawing on a literature review and case analysis, the paper develops an analytical framework centered on data supplementation, standardized identification, and dynamic tracking, and supports the analysis with regulatory policies, local pilot programs, and banking practices in China. The analysis suggests that, by providing dynamic, structured, and comparable carbon-related information, enterprise carbon accounts can, to some extent, mitigate information asymmetry in green financing and improve the informational basis for green-entity identification, financing pricing, and postloan management. Their effectiveness, however, remains constrained by data quality, the degree of standardization, platform interoperability, and the digital application capabilities of financial institutions. Overall, enterprise carbon accounts are emerging as an important source of alternative data for the identification of green financing, but at the current stage they are better understood as a supportive financial infrastructure than as an independent substitute for traditional credit assessment.