Accelerating Sustainability & Fintech: Innovation Scouting with Rabobank
Make it stand out
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The client
Rabobank is a cooperative bank based in the Netherlands. Renowned for its deep expertise in food and agriculture, Rabobank provides a wide range of financial products and advisory services tailored to the needs of farmers and agri-businesses, as well as customers typically associated with banks. Retail and business customers are primarily located in the Benelux region, whilst Rabobank’s agricultural clients cover every continent of the globe, from the US & Canada to Australia & New Zealand, to Sub-Saharan Africa and South America.
Innovation within Rabobank therefore goes much further than financial products, and extends to sustainable farming, nature restoration, energy transition, and other key challenges and opportunities that the agricultural industry brings.
Rabobank’s Open Innovation team, our key client, lives within the Innovation Factory: the core vehicle for innovation within Rabobank and with its partners. The OI Team’s role is to be an internal consultancy for the bank, aiding innovation leads across the organisation to learn what’s new, what’s disruptive, and what’s inspiring for future endeavours. Essentially, the team help these leads with their buy/partner/build strategy.
Our role
Since 2019, TNW has been the key scouting partner for Rabo’s Open Innovation team, helping the team with market intelligence and solution discovery for a broad range of core topics: Carbon Bank, Food & Agri, Living Ecosystem, Energy Transition, and the Digitalisation of Banking.
We work closely with the OI team to help scout startups, perform market research & competitor analyses, and assist with deck creation for internal use.
The TNW team has consistently helped bring valuable insights and startup intelligence into our organisation across the past four years, helping us navigate complex markets across a range of different business interests” - Max Kranendijk, Lead Open Innovation
How we did it
TNW acts as an extension of Rabo’s OI team, working on up to 3 projects each week to help. Using our research skills, tools, and network, we help Rabobank gain oversight of any and every emerging innovation across their key domains.
See below for the Rabobank taxonomy:
Our Impact:
Since the beginning of our partnership, we have scouted over 5200 companies across 180 projects. Of these 180 projects, 54% of projects are aligned with the SDGs, focusing on sustainable agriculture, energy transition, and nature restoration. Furthermore, 12% of companies are located in developing countries.
Rabobank now has the opportunity to have sizeable influence in both the food and energy transitions, two of the most pressing challenges our world faces today. We look forward to strengthening our partnership in the years to come to continue being the spotlight for innovations that Rabobank rely on us for.
