Q&A: Standard Chartered & ENGIE Lift the Lid on Qatalyst

In recent years, carbon finance has emerged as one of the fastest growing trends in sustainability.

Carbon markets were one of the major talking points at COP29 in November 2024, with nations ratifying the establishment of a UN-backed regulation body for carbon credits.

Despite its growing prominence, carbon finance is not without its flaws.

Investors in carbon abatement often have a lack of trust in the legitimacy and provenance of projects, which comes from a lack of transparency in the market.

As the world economy seeks to drive interest in decarbonisation projects, it’s essential that investors feel as confident as possible in their purchases, otherwise the burgeoning carbon market may plateau or stagnate.

Qatalyst is one company looking to address these issues. 

Launched in January 2025 through a collaboration between SC Ventures and ENGIE Factory, Qatalyst addresses critical challenges in the carbon credit ecosystem by providing investors with an enterprise-grade due diligence platform. 

In this exclusive Q&A with Sustainability Magazine, Poyan Rajamand, Founder and CEO of Qatalyst, and Harald Eltvedt, Board Director at Qatalyst and member of SC Ventures, discuss how their innovative platform could transform the way carbon markets function forever.

Please introduce yourselves and your roles.

Poyan: I’m Poyan, Founder and CEO of Qatalyst. 

At Qatalyst, we focus on building a platform that supports investors to accelerate their journey of  identification, due diligence and capital deployment, into high-quality carbon abatement projects with greater efficiency, confidence and scale.

Harald: I’m Harald, a Board Director at Qatayst and a member of SC Ventures, where I oversee venture building and incubation. 

SC Ventures is the innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm of Standard Chartered and we are committed to creating ventures that address pressing global challenges — ultimately, rewiring the DNA in banking. 

Our work with Qatalyst focuses on ensuring the credibility and scalability of credible carbon markets. 

Could you tell us how Qatalyst came to be?

Poyan: The idea behind Qatalyst emerged from a fundamental problem that has long plagued carbon markets — a lack of transparency, trust and efficiency in projects due diligence and investment processes. 

Investors often face extensive challenges in evaluating the credibility of carbon projects, managing fragmented workflows and ensuring that climate impact claims align with the latest methodologies. 

We built Qatalyst as an enterprise-grade platform to solve these pain points, bringing rigour, structure and verification to the carbon finance ecosystem. 

We provide a platform to support investors and their teams to identify, support proper due diligence and deploy capital in a faster, more transparent and scalable way.

Harald: From an SC Ventures’ perspective, Qatalyst was incubated with a clear mission: to redefine carbon finance due diligence by providing investment teams with a structured, technology-driven approach to assessing and managing carbon abatement projects. 

Our collaboration with ENGIE Factory, the start-up studio of ENGIE Group, was key in shaping Qatalyst as a platform and their ability to integrate investment best practices with deep industry expertise in sustainability. 

By digitising workflows and incorporating AI-powered analytics, Qatalyst is making carbon finance more efficient, scalable and impactful. 

How would you explain the relationship between SC Ventures, ENGIE and Qatalyst?

Harald: In January 2025, SC Ventures, in collaboration with ENGIE Factory, launched Qatalyst, a due diligence platform for carbon finance markets that facilitates efficient and transparent investment processes in support of global climate goals. 

Aimed at simplifying and accelerating the identification, due diligence and oversight of carbon abatement projects, Qatalyst provides potential investors with an enterprise-grade solution that expedites carbon credit project assessments to support objective and transparent data-driven decisions.

Poyan: By working with the teams at ENGIE Factory, SC Ventures and Standard Chartered’s carbon department, Qatalyst has identified pain points and implemented solutions that enable investors to consider new projects that may have been too small before. 

Qatalyst’s platform enables investors to better match project types to methodologies and aims to ultimately empower investment teams to be more efficient.

What is the mission of Qatalyst?

Poyan: What Qatalyst is doing is effectively bringing credibility to this market and scaling funding into carbon abatement projects. 

Financiers currently face extensive due diligence requirements to ensure projects deliver the promised carbon impact. 

What we’re doing at Qatalyst is providing technology to financiers to expedite identification, due diligence and check that the carbon abatement project aligns with the latest methodologies.

Harald: Qatalyst was incubated by SC Ventures — the innovation, fintech investment and ventures arm of Standard Chartered — and works to ensure the credibility of carbon abatement projects by leveraging new technology such as AI-enabled tools to help investors understand if a project is a sound investment, whilst providing the carbon impact promised.

With Qatalyst’s platform, investors no longer need to manually shift through thousands of documents and can see easily if the project aligns with their target carbon abatement methodology. 

What service does Qatalyst provide to clients? How do they use it? What kind of benefits might they receive by using it?

Poyan: Our platform leverages advanced technology, including AI-enabled tools, to help investors make decisions faster and with greater confidence in project outcomes. 

By integrating requirements from external registries, internal compliance needs and evolving regulations, Qatalyst is hoping to help more financing be deployed into carbon abatement projects.  

What are your views of carbon credits?

Poyan: Carbon credits, when implemented effectively, are a crucial tool for scaling climate action. 

However, improvements are needed in the market to reduce credibility issues, fragmented verification standards and inconsistent pricing mechanisms. 

For carbon credits to drive real change, the industry needs better transparency, stronger due diligence and scalable technology solutions — all of which Qatalyst is working to enable.

Harald: Carbon credits are essential financial mechanisms for incentivising emissions reductions, but their impact depends entirely on market integrity.

High quality, verifiable credits can mobilise billions in climate finance, while low-quality credits undermine trust in the system. 

The challenge now is to create a structured, reliable market where capital flows to projects that ultimately deliver real-world decarbonisation. 

Qatalyst is playing a vital role in making that vision a reality. 

What is the importance of due diligence in carbon markets?

Poyan: For investors, due diligence is the foundation of trust. 

Without rigorous project assessment, investors fear  risk of greenwashing or underperformance. 

Carbon credit buyers and financiers need verifiable, auditable documentation that their investments lead to real emissions reductions. 

Qatalyst ensures that due diligence is data-driven, standardised and efficient, giving investors confidence in the integrity of the projects they fund. 

What makes a carbon abatement project a sound investment?

Poyan:

1. Carbon markets are developing with new methodologies with improved quality assurance being launched

2. On a policy level, rules around international trade of carbon with clear safeguards around double counting are emerging

3. There is a convergence between carbon compliance markets and the voluntary carbon markets.

All three mechanisms drive towards a more robust carbon market linked to the financial market. 

With that, capital can flow to the most efficient climate abatement projects. 

Lastly, we are far away from goals set out in the Paris Agreement. 

I believe we will realise that to reach these, we must rely more heavily on carbon abatement projects.

What impact has Qatalyst had so far?

Poyan: Since our launch, early user reports show Qatalyst helping institutional investors and project developers streamline their investment processes and reduce due diligence timelines. 

By introducing structured workflows and AI-powered analytics, we have enhanced transparency and supported faster capital deployment into credible carbon abatement projects.

Harald: Qatalyst has already demonstrated its ability to reduce friction in carbon finance, accelerate due diligence and enhance investor confidence. 

As the market matures, we aim to scale adoption, onboard more institutional players and contribute to the broader goal of making carbon finance a more transparent and impactful asset class. 

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