Banyan Infrastructure Q1 Product Release Recap

April 25, 2024

We're excited to announce the latest enhancements to our products, aimed at accelerating capital deployment into sustainable infrastructure. In this product release, we implemented several improvements that are transforming how our customers operate, and we're thrilled to present them to you today, notably our Impact Metrics, investor reporting, new integrations, and more.

Impact Metrics

At Banyan Infrastructure, we understand that investing in sustainable infrastructure comes with a unique set of metrics that are imperative to tracking and understanding project success. Moreover, with government funding like the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund (GGRF) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), a new set of metrics is mandatory for government reporting, tax credits, and ESG compliance requirements. Without an automatic way to track and calculate these metrics, the process is highly time-consuming and lacks transparency into performance.

We built Banyan Infrastructure to provide a centralized view of your project, portfolio, fund performance data, and actionable insights to help you better manage risk and performance. The EPA estimated, which many believe is underestimated, that it could cost anywhere from $1M to $15M a year in overhead costs to manage and compile the required reporting. Our goal is to save our customers valuable time on tedious reporting requirements while providing insightful visualizations to determine program health.

We are excited to introduce a variety of Impact Metrics, which automatically calculate important metrics for internal and external performance management. These metrics are accessible at your fingertips and allow for quick decision-making and report generation.

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Metrics include:

Reduction in Energy Use (MMBtu): This metric keeps track of energy consumption and reduction of energy use in MMBtu. This is a new unit of measurement to track the change in energy usage and is a standard unit of measurement for the volume of gas, the abbreviation for one million British thermal units. Our platform automatically converts MWh to MMBtu.
CO2 Emissions Avoided: This metric tracks the green greenhouse gas, specifically carbon dioxide equivalent, of emissions that were not released due to the creation and operation of a carbon-negative or carbon-efficient project.
Projects Financed in Disadvantaged Communities: This metric looks at whether or not a project is built in a “disadvantaged community” (as defined by the US Government)and the ratio of projects in a portfolio that are disadvantaged compared to those that aren't. This metric uses the same methodology as the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool. It is helpful in tracking project compliance and can be used to secure funding, as these projects can qualify for more funding due to their disadvantaged community status.
Affordable Housing Units Upgraded: This metric allows users to track the number of affordable housing units upgraded from a project or deal.
Public Health Savings: A method for users to keep track of the health impacts of changes in air pollution emissions and the public health savings associated with low-carbon solutions. This metric is designed to intake data from the government's COBRA tool developed by the EPA and is universally used by states and local governments.
Weather Adjusted Forecast: This metric helps to improve forecasting on production performance based on weather patterns.
Leverage Ratio (Private/Public): This metric provides a ratio of Total Loan Amounts allocated to private funding vs Total Loan Amounts allocated to public funding. This is helpful if there are specific targets for funding sourcing in managing financing.
MW Capacity Installed: This metric tracks the total MW Capacity installed on a deal and portfolio level.
MWh Energy Generated: This metric tracks the total MWh Energy that has been generated at the deal and portfolio levels.

If you want to learn more about how a software solution can help with tracking project and federal requirements, such as those from the GGRF and other government initiatives, refer to our white paper on unleashing the GGRF Initiatives or contact us.

Investor Support

Banyan Infrastructure provides much-needed connectivity between all parties involved in transactions. To that end, Banyan has enhanced its ability to provide insight into performance and distributions for investors and limited partners at the Fund level, allowing for greater assurance, transparency, and ease of reporting to investors.

With Banyan Infrastructure's new investor support, you can access beautiful financial performance visualizations for internal and external stakeholders without any extra effort, which otherwise would have taken hours to calculate and produce and be at the risk of errors. The Investor Support features include:

Investor Page: Have a simplified, centralized view of each of your investors’ portfolios and the value you provide them with a dedicated Investor Page showing investment, ownership, exposure, and performance details for individual investors invested in your funds.
Investor Metrics: Automatically track metrics at the investor level based on capital contributions and ownership, like taxable income, CO2e impact, and power production.
Tax Equity and Cash Distributions: Increase visibility into historical and forecast cash distributions that investors receive to enhance investor assurance. Review anticipated ITC and PTC distributions and taxable income passed to investors, quantifying the benefits of their tax equity investments.
Reporting: Easily view metrics by investors and through graphs and tables to show internally or directly to your investors.

New Integrations

We are continuously bolstering our connections within the renewable infrastructure financing ecosystem to streamline data flow, establishing a single source of truth within your systems. This empowers you to onboard faster, maintain superior data integrity, and dedicate more time to insightful analysis and reporting.

New CRM Integration with ZOHO CRM: With this new integration, you can quickly and easily align your business structure and language to Banyan Infrastructure, expediting setup and onboarding. Also, it reduces errors when transferring projects and deal data. Talk with your account manager if you want to add this integration, or contact us to learn more.

And More…

We continuously deploy new product enhancements within our platform and are excited to share some of our latest updates. We have enhanced our platform in several ways, including:

Secure Deal Data Room Sharing: Deal Teams can now share specific files or folders with external guest users to allow guests to view, download, and upload new files directly into shared folders. This streamlines communication and collaboration and creates a shared and auditable single source of truth for crucial documentation.

New User Navigation Interface: Our navigation updates have improved the discoverability and usability of our platform. We are excited to continue delivering a highly intuitive, efficient, and actionable platform for our customers.

If you want to learn more about Banyan Infrastructure, contact us for more information.