Bend - A modern corporate card built for climate-friendly business

@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

@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.

@thomascmost just signed up. promising!

@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.

@danielle_withers Hey Dani, thanks so much for signing up! Totally makes sense that that might throw you — I do think for hard tech, we'd consider that a "Manufacturing and Production" business since you're dealing with physical products. But these are pretty broad categories so I've definitely registered your feedback! As for personal accounts, it's unlikely to happen anytime soon... there's a lot of room for growth just targeting business impact, which account for the lion's share of global emissions.

@thomascmost Thanks, I'll use that category. :)

@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!

@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)

@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!

@samuel_french So, the short answer is not quite. Your mileage will vary depending on what your top spend categories are—for example, almost all of our expenses are software costs so our rewards offset about 50% of our monthly emissions (we then offset the remainder in a separate purchase). A company that travels a lot would have a higher average carbon intensity for their spend, so the rewards wouldn't go as far. But you can always opt in to our net-zero plan!

@adi_patel Thanks so much, Adi!

@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

@thomascmost Very cool!

@adamrturman Yep, good question. We'd argue that as much as companies like to have credit, few companies really need it. We have all the spend management features you'd expect; but you do need to fund your Bend account to start spending. Credit is on the roadmap though, so if it's important to you, definitely let us know!

@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.