It’s only one straw, said 8 billion people, because we believe at Pluxee that any small changes can have an impact.

Starting by having very well embedded into our positioning sustainability from the start. So as you can see, Pluxee brings to life a personalized and sustainable employee experience at work and beyond. And this is important for us to ensure that we can promote well-being, eco-friendly initiatives directly from our solutions. and we actually can have a very big impact. As you can see here, we are targeting today more than 36 million consumers in around 29 countries.

So what is it that we’re doing actually? You may have heard of benefits. So this is our job on a daily basis, is to provide to employers the possibility to provide benefits to their employees, usually with a tax advantage. The main share of the benefits we provide is around meal and food. So you may have a meal card or a food card, and actually this meal and food card, you can actually use it toward a network of shops that we call merchants. So that’s our business today.

It’s a main share of what we provide. So you can imagine the impact we can have on promoting those well-being initiatives as well as eco-friendly, environmentally friendly solutions or sustainable consumption behavior on a daily basis. Also, what we are providing is other services like public benefits. You may have heard in Romania of Socialcard. So we are today providing to more than 2.5 million users, people in need, since 2022, access to hot meals on a daily basis.

Speaking about Romania, as I have the privilege to be here with you today, we wanted to make a special focus and business insight on what Pluxee Romania is about. And you see here that Pluxee Romania is a long-lasting business. It’s been here in the market for more than 25 years. It’s the number one issuer in terms of volume issued in the market. It’s also very close to small and medium enterprises. You can see here that we actually have 75% of our clients being in SME.

And final but not least, it’s a very well-embedded digital tech player with more than 1 million active users on the mobile application as well as around 21 million transactions per year. Final but not least, we’re here to speak about sustainability and actually Rumania is very well positioned at the group level in terms of sustainability. But I don’t want to make any spoilers now, so I will stop here. You’ll see a bit later what they actually did on the journey.

So, mentioning sustainability again, in Pluxee, it’s about combination of small changes, everyone can play a part, and it’s also long-lasting. We heard that this morning. It’s about continuous progress, small actions that can make us progress on a long-lasting basis. And we actually didn’t start from scratch. You may think, Pluxee is a new brand. It’s been recently listed. It’s new, but it’s not. We’ve been acting for 45 years in the business. We were part of Sodexo Group before.

We’ve been recently listed, true. It’s been in February 2024. But we’ve been having this legacy of Sodexo for sustainability, and we’ve been contributing for more than 14 years in this area. As you can see here, we actually take the same order as I understood this morning was important to start with governance. So we have all those dimensions here, trusted partner being the G, the governance, individuals and communities being the S. And today, because we covered already governance this morning and we’re going to cover social this afternoon, we wanted to make a focus on our E, on environmental impact.

And it all started with our trajectory, our targets, being validated by the Science-Based Target Initiative in December 2023. But before we jump into targets, I guess it’s clear for you, global warming, right? What’s happening in terms of climate change. But I just wanted to give you back some important, impactful data that really struck me when I started this journey with Pluxee. So, today the average temperature of the planet is +15°C, right? When you look back then, 20,000 years ago, ice era, remember the mammoth ice everywhere, no bad way of living, it was +10°C on the planet. So only 5°C difference, not much.

When you look at what scientists are saying, if we continue the way we consume today, the way we produce today, we’re going to be at plus 20 degrees Celsius. Only five degrees difference. Well, but the way of living will be quite different, right? What will it look like? So that’s why the Science-Based Target initiative has been created. It’s been jointly created with different organizations like CDP, WRI, WWF that we saw today, and also, of course, Global Compact.

It’s been here to actually help companies to understand how they can act, what should be their contribution to mitigate the climate impact. And it’s actually very obvious, it’s about absolute carbon emissions decrease. meaning a clear reduction from a baseline year until 2050, when we look at the Paris Agreement and the climate science, by 90%. At Pluxee, because we believe we are a service company with strong tech capacities and capabilities, we wanted to go faster and to have a target at 2035 from a baseline year of 2070. but it can seem like a long-lasting commitment. So we wanted to have some immediate actions.

And our first milestone will be 2025, so tomorrow, to be at 100% renewable electricity in our offices. And the second step would be 2030 to run at 65% reduction of emissions. But we are already into targets. First, before we had to define our targets, we had to understand the main components of our GHG emissions based on the GHG protocol. And here is very simple on scope 1 and 2, but we had to really consider our full value chain on scope 3. So scope 1, as most companies, is related to the fossil fuel we are burning directly. And for us, it’s mostly our company vehicle and some of the buildings that are not electrified today.

Scope 2 is around the electricity consumption from our buildings, obviously, and some co-manufacturers that are using electricity also to be plugged in. Scope 3 is about our value chain. If you understand our business, the main thing that is under operation is the production of paper vouchers, when we still have paper vouchers, manufacturing of cards, and all the transport associated, as well as the end of life, when you destroy the paper or when you destroy the card. Second aspect is around the digital services because we are a tech company so we have to develop websites, mobile apps as well as other technical services like customer care. Final but not least, as most services company we are also having a big impact on our employees mobility and other purchases we actually provide.

Well, once we understand our carbon footprint, then we need to have the right analytical tools, data, to understand what to focus on what matters most and to have a concrete action plan to move forward. So that’s where we actually wanted to share with you some examples of what we are doing, starting with the foundations that I guess are all the same within your companies. Main foundation, first, awareness. All people should be on board. and it starts with them being aware that they have an impact. Every employee, every department, every country in our aspect, as we have 29 countries to deal with. So this is the first step. Okay?

So what we did was to create our own training a few years back that was named the Race to Net Zero. It was a gamified experience, and we had around 70% of the employees that actually took this training globally. Second step, of course, we mentioned scope three, is mostly related to our suppliers. So we needed to ensure they were engaged. For that, we took our most strategic suppliers, around 90 suppliers. We trained them to ensure they can measure the carbon footprint and also that they had an associated decarbonization plan to help us and support us in the journey. And last but not least, we mentioned it earlier, close governance and monitoring.

It cannot work if it doesn’t start from the top. And it cannot work if everyone is on board at different level of the company. And also, because we are a global company, it cannot work if all the countries are not onboarded. So we actually sourced a software on the market that can help every country to actually project their carbon emissions, project the associated trajectory based on a set of preloaded actions they can input into their carbon emission reduction and see the simulation that it will provide in terms of trajectory. It’s been implemented in all countries and they all created their own action plan that they, every year, share with us on the strategic plan.

Then, in terms of concrete actions, we wanted to give you three main elements. We mentioned energy consumption. Today, there’s no big surprise, there is a lot of flexing work and it helps us a lot because then it helps to optimize the office surface, to think through, okay, some people are coming two days a week, some people are coming three. Can we optimize the office surface? It’s the first way. Second way is also to ensure that we are in the right buildings with the right energy efficiency and the right, you know, labels that can help us to have the right energy consumption. And last, of course, we mentioned renewable electricity. That is another way to start to decarbonize also our operations. So I give you two examples here. In France, we managed to reduce the office surface by 40%, which helped us actually to reduce by 78% the energy consumption in the building.

Second example is around global renewable electricity reach. We managed to increase by 2022 to 2023 44% of electricity direct sourcing within the world. Second, mobility. Very tricky one, I guess you all agree, because it’s dependent on three main factors. It’s dependent on the employee itself, so is he willing to change habits, to change comfort, convenience? It’s dependent on public authorities and infrastructure that are available to people in the market. And third, it’s dependent on the employer because the employer will then have to choose the right location for the office depending on how people are coming and where do they live, close or not to the city area. Well, we still managed to find some impactful initiatives. I will give you examples again. So if we start with Belgium, we managed to relocate the office in Brussels city center. it helped actually to change the ratio of people coming with individual vehicles to work from 65% to 6%. So you can imagine the impact.

We removed parking spaces, we have less parking spaces than before, and it really reinforced, because you know there’s traffic jams, there’s all these issues, so relocating, ensuring that it’s possible. Also in Belgium, we created an allowance for employees that are more interested in using the individual car. So they can actually go for multi-mobility benefits that are much more interesting than the individual car allowance. So that’s another aspect, another incentive. Another example is France.

Recently we relocated to Paris city center, reducing the number of parking spaces it reduced by two-thirds the number of people coming with their individual car and actually helped to reduce by 73% the carbon emissions related to this specific category. Also, because we try to go beyond our own operations, we try to sell services and offers that can help our clients to actually have also clean mobility possibilities. For instance, in France and Belgium, we are working with a partner that is named Keeper that helps to actually provide multimodal capacities and mobility thanks to a preset budget that employees can use to purchase bikes or accessories or even transport tickets. So that’s about all this. Last but not least, products and payment. As you saw from our value chain, it is a critical component.

We used to be a paper company. We used to print paper vouchers all the time and personalize. We moved to CAD, so digitization, and now we are moving to virtual, meaning you pay with your phone. This is a new capacity. It’s helping to reduce manufacturing, it’s helping to reduce transport, and it’s helping to reduce the issue with the end of life. This is the first aspect. But it cannot be standalone. It needs to be combined with sustainable technologies. And we want to work with the top cloud providers to ensure that we materialize as much as possible the technology capacities and that we are not stuck with physical servers.

We don’t know how to manage because we are not an IT company. We are a tech company, which is different. We want to work with those cloud providers that also are providing, are sourcing their energy from renewable sources or from clean energy. And also, we are responsible for the coding phase. So we want to ensure that we are doing lean code as well as switching off these servers when we can make it happen when there’s actually no developers on the platform at the time of the day. And actually a very good example I will give here is Pluxee Romania. They really managed very well. They managed so well that actually they received a price for it, internal price, so congrats to them again, because they got the best carbon emission reduction globally. Why? I give you some insights.

They reduced by 56% their carbon emission from our baseline year, which is 2017, to actually 2023. And it’s mostly due to digitization. First, they actually used to print paper, produce, actually directly print the paper directly in the offices. From 2020 to 2022, they progressively outsourced cards and reduced drastically the usage of paper in the operation. It helped to reduce by 56% the energy in the buildings. Second step is around the product itself. So you don’t produce paper anymore, you produce cards. A paper voucher is only one time usage. A card for five years, in some countries it’s even ten years if I speak about Brazil, so you can use it for a lot of transactions. That’s why they have come to reduce by 79% the carbon footprint. And also, new in Romania, not so new but a few months back, Romania managed to offer also a virtual option.

It’s available, it’s free, it’s immediate, and it’s available to all the clients of Pluxee today. So it’s helping us to reduce our carbon emissions, but most importantly, it’s also helping our clients to reduce the carbon emissions associated with a specific product. So you may think, wow, Pluxee is doing very well. It’s a quiet and long river. But I think we’re all here to realize that it’s not always the case. And it’s a transformation journey. It’s a daily effort and a daily progress to make it happen. So as I was saying, it’s a transformation journey. It needs to impact every people at every stage in the company.

We managed to really have the support from the board and from the executive committee to go in front with this journey. We have it part of the strategic plan, the global execution plan. It’s a monthly alert plan where if we see that we’re not meeting our targets, it’s becoming something very closely monitored. And we managed now to do some quarterly forecasts on our carbon emissions thanks to the countries. It’s also about prioritizing impacts. You see here there are so many actions we can conduct. We need to focus efforts. So on our side, we decided to focus immediate progress on scope 2 because that’s where we have the most triggers and actions that we can conduct in immediate years. Second aspect, as you realized, we have 29 countries. Not all of them have the same level of maturity.

So we had also to prioritize on countries and we choose to also focus our efforts at the beginning with the ones representing accounting for 80% of our carbon emissions. It’s a top 15 countries. With these specific countries, we developed a net zero steering committee from which we actually share best practices. They can highlight the blockers, what is not easy to manage, and also it helps them to find new actions that they can conduct locally. We also insisted for those countries to have a local CSR committee, meaning that they have within locally the country departments that can actually have several actions to make it happen at their local level. Well, I’m going to repeat myself, but it’s all about progress. It’s not always easy. You see, this year we had very exceptional events with the rebranding, with the spin-off. So of course, it’s not a long-lasting journey and we need to find ways to mitigate when such exceptional events happen.

And I’m sure you’re all aware of CSRD. Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, we’re going to be eligible from this fiscal year, 2025. So we are starting to– we are prepared. We are preparing the teams, the departments, It can seem like a nightmare in terms of reporting, but we believe that it’s actually an opportunity because it’s not only small changes one by one, but it’s actually the aggregation of those changes that will make things happen. The material topics are touching every of Pluxee’s departments that will all take ownership and that will have the proper governance to ensure that we can reach our targets. So again, small changes becoming an aggregate of big changes for a further impact with all the progress we can do. Thank you for everything.