Ontoly works with financial institutions in Canada and the US on sustainable finance products, pre-purchase offtakes and direct credit sales. Carbon finance and lending are complementary pools of capital, and wide-scale building decarbonization needs both.
Deep retrofits are capital-intensive and chronically underfunded — not because the projects are bad, but because operational savings do not service the debt on their own. Carbon revenue changes the shape of that problem without solving all of it.
In our New York work, carbon credits have been able to cover a portion of a project's capital cost, up to roughly 40% in some cases. That is significant, and it is not the whole number. The remainder is precisely the kind of financing need that sits naturally with a lender: a defined capital cost, a measurable performance obligation, and a physical asset in a building with a known owner. The synergy here is structural rather than incidental.
We are actively exploring partnerships with financial institutions to develop competitive sustainable finance products for building retrofits. One structure we find particularly promising: the institution contracts with the building owner to purchase the carbon credits, and the value of that purchase is passed through either as a direct subsidy to the project or as a materially more attractive interest rate.
The effect is to convert an uncertain future revenue stream into certainty at the moment the borrower is deciding whether to proceed — which is the moment that determines whether these projects happen at all. It also gives the institution an originated carbon position in a credit type that is measured rather than estimated, verified at the individual building, and traceable to a named asset.
Most institutions we speak with are already well-versed in trading and selling carbon credits, and are a trusted source of information into the market. The constraint has not been capability. It has been finding supply that survives diligence.
BERUs are certified under the Building Emissions Reduction Standard from measured pre- and post-retrofit utility data, aligned with ASHRAE Guideline 14 Option C and IPMVP, at the level of the individual building rather than an aggregated portfolio. Every project carries an NPV-based financial additionality rating. Ontoly has applications under review with the ICVCM and for CORSIA eligibility as of August 2026.
For an institution whose reputation travels with the credits it distributes, resolution and provenance are the product.
Building retrofits sit inside the real estate and commercial lending book that many institutions are already working to decarbonize. Financing the retrofit reduces emissions in the portfolio; purchasing or distributing the resulting credits gives the institution a defensible role in the transaction beyond the loan. We are genuinely interested in supporting institutions pursuing financed-emissions objectives, and in helping them take a visible position as champions of the energy transition rather than passive participants in it.
We expect a credit committee to ask hard questions, so here is what is available to answer them. Every project carries a Preliminary Assessment Report with the projected volume, the crediting period and the additionality analysis. Every issuance is backed by measured utility data and a third-party verification statement. Title is documented from the building owner through the building representative to the buyer, at the level of the individual building rather than a pooled portfolio, which means an institution can name the asset behind the tonne in its own reporting.
The honest limitation to plan for is delivery variance on pre-purchased volumes. We issue only on real measured performance and do not adjust data to meet a contracted quantity, so a building that underperforms delivers fewer tonnes that year. The pre-purchase rate is discounted to reflect that, and the residual risk is a contractual matter between buyer and seller — insurance, delivery guarantees, or an offtake structured across a portfolio of buildings rather than a single one.
