FAQ
Aside from benefits to the planet, climate action is also good for business:
- Win sales as a climate-friendly business: 57% of customers would change providers to reduce environmental impact, and 71% would pay a price premium for sustainable brands (IBM).
- Build customer loyalty: Enhance your brand’s reputation and set your brand apart with a commitment to sustainability.
- Boost employee morale and retention: Climate-friendly companies have 40% higher employee retention (Deloitte), and 3/4 of millennials would take a pay cut to work at a sustainable company (Fast Company).
- Appeal to investors: Public companies with climate programs outperform peer stocks by 4.8% on average (HBS) and, in 2020, outperformed by 23.4% (Fidelity).
- Reduce supply-chain risk: Increase accountability and reduce energy use, material use, and future supply chain risks by engaging with partners in your value chain.
- Reduce operational costs: Most carbon-reducing is also cost-reducing.
- Take advantage of tax benefits: The recently passed congressional climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, includes tax benefits and savings for companies that take green actions.
- Be audit-ready: Recent SEC rulings on climate disclosure go into effect this year for public companies, and B2B companies who sell their products and services to public companies will increasingly need to share information about their climate impact.
Yes! We provide marketing assets, including badges and best practices for copy, to promote on your website. Plus, you can publish an optional Bend profile, which you can share internally and/or externally.
For some examples of our customers’ Bend profiles, see Trust & Will and Fathom.
Bend has an integration with QuickBooks, allowing you to pull in data and get CO2e estimates for any non-Bend purchases (e.g., payroll made via ACH, travel purchases made via wire, etc.). Bend also supports wire transfer and ACH directly via the Bend platform, allowing you to see the climate impact of those purchases — learn more.
Yes! Bend is free, with no account opening fees, no monthly fees, no minimum balance requirements, and no fees for additional cards. There is also no fee to use the carbon emissions tracker and insights. For a full fee schedule, see pricing.
Every time you make a purchase on your Bend card, the merchant pays a fee (called “interchange”), which is split between our partner bank and the merchant’s underlying bank. We get a portion of that fee.
Carbon credits include both carbon removal and carbon avoidance projects, and range in price from $10/ton to $100/ton. The projects Bend supports are removal only, at a price of at least $100/ton. To get to net zero by 2050, we need to support these science-based projects, which store carbon permanently (>1,000 years) and have demonstrated potential to scale to gigatons of carbon removal.
According to the Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting, only removal offsets are consistent with net zero goals.
Planting trees is part of the solution, but most models suggest that trees alone will not get us to a net zero economy.To learn more, we recommend this article by Dr. Hausfather in the New York Times.
We support premium, engineered carbon removal projects, at a price point of at least $100 / ton, roughly 10x the industry average.
Most offsets used today are 'avoidance' offsets, where e.g. some portion of forest that was slated to be cut down is saved. Avoidance offsets can have positive impact, but they suffer from questionable claims and over-crediting. Avoidance offsets are not aligned with The Oxford Principles for Net Zero Aligned Carbon Offsetting.
For this reason, Bend supports carbon removal projects: where carbon is literally pulled from the atmosphere. We follow the lead of industry experts and scientists, drafting off the selections made by Frontier Climate and Microsoft.
Currently, the projects you can help support via Bend include:
Don't see a carbon removal project you'd like to support with the rewards you earn? Please message us — our goal is to support any and all high quality carbon removal projects.
Bend gives best-in-class spend-based CO2e estimates. We have the largest database of per-transaction, merchant-specific CO2e information, with category fallbacks, guaranteeing 100% coverage. With the Amazon Business integration, we take it a step further with product-level data for each item in your order.
Other emissions trackers rely on a handful of off-the-shelf emissions factors to estimate the emissions of certain activities (e.g. 0.225 kg/mile traveled via airplane, 0.343 kg/mile traveled via car, and so on). This approach is inadequate — the coverage is limited, and the generic emissions averages obscure a huge amount of variation (different cars or aircraft have different performance profiles, airplanes are not uniformly full, etc.). But more importantly, this legacy approach doesn’t create the right accountability. If all air travel is treated interchangeably, JetBlue (for example) isn’t rewarded for upgrading their fleet, or exploring the use of biofuels, or offering more direct flights, or reducing the emissions of their operations, etc. We want JetBlue competing with United, and American, and all the other airlines, to offer the lowest relative emissions. And we want every business in every industry competing in this race. Generic industry averages won’t cut it.
We use the most detailed data available for every CO2e estimate. Some CO2e estimates are high-resolution; others are lower-resolution, due to a lack of detailed data.
For example: if you purchase a coffee at Starbucks, we uses merchant-specific emissions data published by Starbucks directly. But if you purchase a coffee at a small, independent coffee shop, odds are they don't share sustainability data. In those cases, we fall back to category-based 'cafe' emissions factor, and the error bands on that CO2e estimate will be wider.
We value transparency, and want to pass along as much information as possible about the accuracy of each CO2e estimate. For that reason, we always through a confidence score, along with our CO2e estimate — more info.
Bend follows GHG Protocol’s Scope 3 Accounting and Reporting Standard. This is the same methodology some public companies will use in their annual sustainability reports. All CO2e estimates are aligned with industry-standard standards and disclosures, including SBTi, PCAF, SFDR, etc.
In addition to spend-based carbon accounting, we can help you develop a more detailed analysis of your Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions. This typically involves pulling in other data sources, including utility bills. Please contact us to learn more about services and pricing.
Yes! In addition to using Bend directly, we also can pull in spend data from your 3rd-party accounts. Contact us for more info.
Bend accounts work alongside your existing bank, or even with no existing bank account at all.
When you sign up at Bend you'll be assigned an account and routing number. This means you can send and receive ACH and wires, and earn yield on your cash, in addition to transacting with Bend cards.
There are two ways to fund your account on Bend: (1) you can pull funds from an existing bank account, or (2) you can accept payments directly into Bend (from something like Shopify or QBO invoices or Stripe).
Many companies choose to use Bend for day-to-day operational spend, alongside an existing bank account or 'treasury' account. Other customers use Bend as an all-in-one solution (cash and cards).
It's entirely up to each customer. Of course, the more activity you bring to Bend, the more complete the climate insights we'll be able to generate.
