The EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism prices the carbon embedded in imported steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers and hydrogen, and the UK adds its own border from 01-01-2027. The declarant surrenders certificates against those emissions, so embedded carbon is now a line in the landed cost.
One record, answering every party in the transaction.
certificate count and declaration
sourcing and price position
reconciled to source and tier
a submission that reconciles
Your data is held in installations across several countries. Your obligations arise in the EU, in the UK from 2027, and in whichever market legislates next. Cappi collects once and renders to each of them.
One figure sets the importer's certificate liability and decides whether the exporter's goods land cheaper or dearer than the competition. Neither side can move it alone. A provider working one end of that transaction can report the cost. It cannot reduce it.
Default values price your goods at the worst case. Cappi replaces them with actuals evidenced at the installation and its precursor suppliers, so fewer certificates are surrendered and your goods land cheaper than a competitor still settling on defaults.
What makes this commercial rather than administrative is the default value. Where actual emissions are not evidenced to the standard the regulation requires, the declaration falls back to default figures set deliberately high, and the importer pays against those. The exporter feels it immediately, because a buyer comparing two suppliers is comparing landed cost, and the supplier who can evidence lower actual emissions is the cheaper one at the same price. The carbon figure has become part of the quote, and the party who can prove it holds the advantage on both sides of the transaction.
For exporters and importers trading into the EU and the UK.
CBAM is settled by two parties who cannot move the figure alone. The producer holds the data that decides it, the importer carries the certificate bill that results from it, and the buyer, the customs authority and the verifier each test the same submission. Cappi reaches the installation and its precursor suppliers, resolves one figure, and renders it to every party in the transaction, which is why the exporter lands cheaper and the importer surrenders fewer certificates from the same piece of work.
Defaults are calibrated so that no exporter is better off staying silent. Unmeasured goods are priced as though they were among the most emissions-intensive on the market, whatever the installation actually does. That is not a cost of trading. It is a cost of not measuring, and you can take it back.
Illustrative, based on published default values against evidenced actual intensities including precursors. Your own figure depends on your sites, routes and CN codes.
The arithmetic is public. Once installation-level activity data exists, the method is settled and anyone competent can run it. What separates one provider from the next is how far up the chain they reach for that data, because that is what moves the figure and therefore the bill.
Each shallower approach earns its place. An ERP module saves you the submission and is the natural home for it. A supplier request gives you a record that you asked. A desk estimate gives you a planning number. All three are useful, and all three leave the default in place, which means the bill is unchanged.
Cappi reaches the installation, and then one tier further to the precursor producer, where most of the embedded figure is made. On the illustrative case above that takes ninety thousand certificates to ten thousand, a reduction of eighty-nine per cent. It is a field operation joined to a methodology and a review chain, and it is where the saving is.
Carbon accounting platforms are built to estimate at scale. That is the right design for a corporate inventory and the wrong one for a border, where a customs authority and an accredited verifier both have to arrive at your figure from your inputs. Cappi does not model the number. It rebuilds it from the meter reading, the invoice and the production record, so every figure on your declaration can be walked back to the document it came from.
The calculation was never the difficult part. Reaching the installation, and then the precursor producer one tier further up where most of the embedded figure is generated, is where nearly every alternative gives up and falls back to a default.
The work is the same work. What differs is who it earns for and where it lands.
And it is no longer a CBAM-only cost. Carbon pricing is taking shape in several of the markets you produce in, India, China and Vietnam among them, so the same installation and precursor data increasingly answers a domestic obligation as well as a border one. Collect it once and it earns twice.
Where a supplier will not engage, the default stands, and Cappi says so rather than inventing a number. That answer is commercially useful in itself: it identifies which suppliers are carrying an unmanaged carbon cost into your contracts.
The share of embedded emissions charged at the border increases in defined annual steps as free allocation is withdrawn. Each step raises what an unmeasured figure costs, on identical goods.
UK CBAM applies from 01-01-2027 on direct emissions, first return in 2028, indirect from 2029, priced against UK ETS. Sell into both markets and you either answer two authorities from one dataset or build the work twice.
EU data residency on AWS, tenant isolation, a full audit trail on every row, and an explicit clause on data rights in every engagement. Your data and your suppliers' data are never pooled into anything you have not agreed to.
Every evidence pack exports in open formats at any moment with its derivation intact. Your proof travels to any buyer, verifier or system without depending on Cappi remaining in the picture.
The asset outlives the filing that prompted it. The same installation, precursor and site data that answers the border answers product carbon questions from customers and the corporate disclosure your finance team is already preparing, from the same stored rows. Values are never summed across regimes.
The Exposure Snapshot returns your own figure: what your consignments cost on default values against evidenced actuals, across your CN codes and routes. No cost, no obligation, and it is yours whether or not anything follows.
Thirty minutes. Confidential from the first conversation.
