Ontoly licenses its registry and certification software to municipalities designing flexibility mechanisms alongside a building performance standard — so that compliance dollars end up in retrofits rather than in a general fund.
More municipalities are adopting building performance standards, and most are exploring flexibility mechanisms alongside them: RECs, alternative compliance payments, offsets of one kind or another. That instinct is right. A standard without a release valve tends to produce either exemptions or a fine schedule, and neither one puts a heat pump in a building.
But the design details decide everything. Where a program leans on unbundled RECs, a building can comply on paper while still burning gas on site, which is not what the policy was written to achieve. We generally recommend limits on REC use, and specifically that RECs not be permitted to offset combustion emissions, so that the compliance pathway and the policy goal stay pointed in the same direction.
The deeper problem is the one that has killed carbon pricing regimes outright: the perception, often accurate, that the money is not going to real action. If compliance payments disappear into revenue, the constituency for the policy erodes and the policy gets repealed. A mechanism that routes compliance capital directly into verified retrofits in your own jurisdiction is not just more efficient — it is what lets the regulation survive a change of government.
We license our software so that you can operate a trading mechanism without building a registry from scratch. Building owners submit their projects to request carbon finance, and owners carrying a compliance obligation can trade with them. You get the infrastructure — project listing, eligibility screening, quantification, monitoring, third-party verification, issuance, serialization and transfer — configured to your regulation.
Licensing packages scale and are tailored. Some municipalities want a full cap-and-trade layer. Some want a narrow, well-governed offset pathway with a hard limit on how much of an obligation it can satisfy. Some want the quantification and verification engine and nothing else. Standing up an offset system in-house is a genuinely large undertaking, and for most jurisdictions it is not the best use of staff capacity.
In our New York pilot we incorporated Local Law 97 compliance fees directly into the additionality calculations. That mattered more than it sounds. We assessed whether each project still showed a negative net present value after factoring in the positive benefit of avoided future compliance fees — because if the compliance fee alone already made the retrofit profitable, carbon revenue would not be additional and the credits should not exist.
The projects we certify are the ones where the owner would rationally have paid the compliance fee instead of installing the technology. Carbon finance closes that specific gap. This kind of interaction between a local regulation and a crediting mechanism has to be modelled explicitly, and we have done it.
Fixed-price compliance assumes the regulator can guess the marginal cost of abatement correctly across an entire building stock. It is very rare for supply and demand to meet neatly at a single administered price. Costs vary enormously by building age, fuel, system type and tenancy, and one price is either too low to move the expensive buildings or too high for the cheap ones.
Letting building owners trade allows capital to find the lowest-cost reductions first. You get more tonnes per compliance dollar, more projects actually built, and a visible record of where the money went. Efficiency in the mechanism translates into action in the building stock.
We start with your regulation, not our software. What is the compliance obligation, who does it bind, what does the fine schedule look like, and what flexibility is the policy willing to permit? From there we can show you which parts of the Ontoly system map onto your mechanism and which parts you do not need.
Most conversations then turn on three design questions: how much of an obligation a credit should be allowed to satisfy, whether eligibility is limited to buildings inside your jurisdiction, and how the interaction between compliance payments and additionality is calculated so that you are not paying twice for a reduction the regulation already forced. Those are policy decisions, not software decisions, and we would rather work them through with you before quoting anything.
Ontoly has applications under review with the ICVCM and for CORSIA eligibility as of August 2026. We put those forward as measures of credibility, and we expect municipalities to scrutinise both our methodology and our governance before licensing anything. The BERS Standard, our verification standard and our governance package are published.
We see regulation as the thing that creates price and demand. We see ourselves as the flexibility mechanism that lets your jurisdiction move faster and further inside it.
