This month, we take a closer look at Workday and the Inter-American Development Bank, two corporate buyers whose history in the market is well-established but whose paths forward sit in contrast. Drawing on AlliedOffsets data, we explore how their activity, credit preferences, and engagement have evolved over time.
2025 saw the rise of American Technology and Telecommunications company Workday (US98138H1014) to A+ rated status among the 8,000+ known buyers active in the VCM last year. Building on regular activity in 2024, last year it retired credits almost every month for corporate targets and public environmental claims, making it one of only a handful operating with such frequency. Most of these were credits from the removal-specialized registry Isometric, and were also ICAO First Phase Aligned.
Starting the year strong, January retirements jumped to an all-time high of 129,400. By volume, most of these credits were from orphan oil and gas well plugging projects in the United States and Canada. January’s activity also included projects working on the destruction of ozone depleting substances (ODS) and high-global warming potential (GWP) foam, biochar, geologically stored biomass, and ocean alkalinity enhancement. The former project type has been of increasing interest to other pioneering buyers operating in the same sector, such as Amazon and Google. This highly sophisticated selection of projects is facilitated by a clear willingness to spend; in all time it’s estimated that Workday’s portfolio is valued at over $3.5 million.
In parallel, the company has taken a targeted and aggressive approach to decarbonization. It is committed to sourcing 100% renewable electricity and, in 2019, partnered with Bloomberg, Cox Enterprises, Gap, and Salesforce to sign the first-ever small-buyer aggregate renewable energy project.
A dedicated data centre infrastructure team has worked extensively on server power optimization to enable power-saving settings that could significantly reduce power consumption across 80% of physical servers globally. This means that although the number of physical servers has increased by approximately 80%, its total data centre electricity consumption only increased by 25%. This type of focus on efficiency will need to become more commonplace as data centre-reliant technologies become embedded in more companies across the world.
Turning to travel emissions, Workday also made a five-year advance purchase of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) via the SkyNRG Board Now program. This purchase supports the development of the first European SAF production facility, located in the Netherlands, showing a dual pronged approach to reducing Scope 3 emissions and helping to scale technologies that are yet to reach production at widely commercial volumes.
Unusually, Workday also expects that 70% of its suppliers (by spend) will have science-based targets by fiscal year 2026. Given this degree of ambition and success in delivery so far, it’s something of a surprise that the company hasn’t committed to a 1.5°C pathway to achieve net-zero emissions across its entire value chain before 2050.
As a multilateral development bank serving Latin America and the Caribbean, IADB cuts slightly a different shape to other companies in the financial services space. Its assessment of its greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions is primarily focused on the projects it helps to finance, rather than the institution’s own immediate operations. Particular focus is dedicated to the scope 1 and 2 emissions of large infrastructure works in the energy, transportation, urban, agriculture, and water and sanitation sectors. The IADB is, generally, working on supporting projects towards Paris Agreement alignment, including the Multilateral Investment Fund to improve individual access to the voluntary carbon market in Argentina.
The bank’s own VCM activity has fluctuated significantly since its first known retirement took place in 2011. At its peak, the IADB offset its 2015 footprint with a 32,000 tonne transaction of nature-based removal credits, brokered by Taking Root, but since then its retirements have generally been smaller in volume. January’s tranche of retirements were all from Gold Standard Projects, split between waste disposal, renewable energy, and household devices based in the Americas. The estimated offer price per credit varied between $5 and $8. It isn’t clear what its longer term strategy towards using the VCM will be, but its historic engagement suggests that we will see them again in the next year or two.
Read our Voluntary Carbon Market 2025 Review for a data-driven view of buyer trends in 2025 here