With Bend any company or organization can automatically track and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (for free!) as they earn 4% yield on deposits, and carbon removal credits with every purchase.
I'll keep my "how we got here" brief — We went through YC last summer with a mission of mapping the carbon graph, attaching sustainability insights to as many purchase decisions as possible.
Late last year, we realized the fastest way to pursue that mission was to issue a card, and change the way businesses think about spend from within their corporate card program.
Now, in record time, we're very excited to be launching the Bend card, earning carbon removal rewards on every purchase and attaching CO2e estimates on every purchase.
Curious what the impact of your AWS subscription is? Your quarterly conference travel? Try moving some of your spend onto our platform and join the movement of sustainable businesses 🚀
Amazing to see this out in the world. Spend management makes sense as the best way for smaller companies and orgs to begin the journey of understanding their emissions profile and taking actions to improve.
Congrats on the launch @thomascmost and @tedp!
This cool AND impactful for the environment! Is there a rough estimate of credit card spend -> CO2 emissions reduced? e.g. if on average, your company spends $10k/month on the card, you'll reduce your CO2 emissions by X?
I ask this because for some companies, it could be impactful to say "We're carbon neutral" all with just their CC spend!
@azianmike Totally! I think unfortunately the economics don't quite work out that way, even if your spend is very low impact. Our own rewards on the platform offset around 30-50% of our emissions, depending on the month, but that's because we invest only in very high quality offsets at a market leading price of $100 / tonne. This blows away the average industry offset price per tonne, which is sadly heavily skewed towards greenwashing with low-credibility avoidance offsets.
This looks great, could actually use it ourselves. We do use a few other banks too... can I pull in data from my other accounts? Nice work on this launch!
@sarupbanskota Yes! We can actually support additional data intake with direct connections to Brex or Ramp, as well as QBO or CSV upload if we don't have an integration.
Thank you so much for the question! Would love to have you on the platform.
This BYO bank option makes this zero friction I love it - can I do virtual cards and set limits, etc? To be a power user I’ll likely need card issuance feature parity to Mercury/Brex
@helenamerk Yes, virtual cards are central to the experience (less plastic!)—you can set and adjust budgets easily and create vendor cards as well (I think we have the nicest vendor card UI in the game)
@beau_allison Absolutely—for example if you want to go net-zero on the platform you could connect your ERP, or upload a CSV of your outside transactions, utilities, etc.
@darren_caulley Two great questions :) We talk about this in full on our "How It Works" page here: https://usebend.com/how-it-works — but the short version is we have specific "carbon intensity" factors, some specific to merchants like Apple or Google Ads, others category or product code based, and we derive a likely carbon footprint from the price.
As for the offsets, we work with Patch for certification and guaranteed delivery, and purchase only US-based carbon removal projects... no avoidance offsets! We want to be as credible as possible
@philip_kelvin we do serve businesses in the UK via our 'BYO Bank' version, but unfortunately we can only issue cards in the USA. Please get in touch if you're interested in checking it out!
@jdpigeon Like other card companies, we keep a percentage of the interchange as revenue. We also have rev-share with our offsets provider, Patch, and have enterprise SaaS subscriptions for customers that need more than our self-serve carbon accounting tools.
@nickyarmesch The short answer is, more than accurate enough to be credible. We do rate our assessments on a Confidence Score out of 10 to be fully transparent when we're using a more or less narrow factor. For example with our Amazon Business integration we can actually estimate the emissions from each line item product individually, which is definitely our sharpest method. More here though! https://usebend.com/how-it-works
@dracstaxi Back-end is primarily Rust using Axum, with some TypeScript Node services as well — frontend is NextJS! Deployed on Google Cloud and Vercel :)
This looks awesome! Congrats on the launch @thomascmost ! What was the process that made you decide to transition to the card issuance approach? What are the challenges on traditional carbon accounting that the card approach solves?
@alexander_grant1 The world of carbon accounting is way underdeveloped in the US today compared to Europe, so we found we were kind of having to educate our customers as to why they would even need software for that in our sales pipeline. Ultimately we realized that spending money is something every company needs to do, so we committed to building a superb corporate card product with built-in carbon accounting to overcome that gap in the ecosystem.
Traditional carbon accounting is also very expensive and manual. ACVs at Watershed start at like $40k, and it's a laborious consulting process. Our methodology is both credible and automatic, so we can start to bring highly credible carbon accounting down-market to companies that couldn't afford it otherwise!
Congrats on the launch! I have a few questions. How do you calculate greenhouse gas emissions from spending, and what type of recommendations do you make? Is it something along the lines of provider X is more environmentally friendly than provider Y which you're currently using? I really like this idea — excited to give it a try!
Bend