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TreeCard’s wooden bank card aims to reforest the planet

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TreeCard, a UK fintech innovator, has unveiled its flagship wooden bank card. Designed to minimise negative environmental effects, its USP is planting trees using our everyday interchange fees.

If you needed a valid excuse to burn through your hard earned wages in 2021, we may have just found it.

TreeCard, a fintech company from the UK has developed the world’s first ever wooden debit card. Wait, I thought money didn’t grow on trees?

Created using sustainably sourced cherry wood, its founders Jamie Cox, Gary Wu, and James Dungan claim the card will soon reduce plastic waste on a global scale while funnelling profits into vital tree planting initiatives.

Securing $5.1 million USD in its latest round of seed funding from the likes of GoCardless founder Matt Robinson and Indeed chief Paul Forster, TreeCard is striving to become the ‘leading green finance brand’ when it launches in the latter part of 2021.

TreeCard

Those who sign up for a card (which you can do here, by the way) will be able to link their new TreeCard account directly to their current account.

After setting up app preferences, purchases can be routed from Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Samsung Pay directly through TreeCard. This will ensure that your interchange fees – the standard fees paid by commercial stores to accept card payments – go towards funding vital tree planting schemes.

Theoretically, you could blossom from a spendthrift into an environmental activist in a single shopping spree. Sounds good, eh?

At no extra charge for the card owner, 80% of the profits taken through interchange fees from our everyday purchases will go towards TreeCard’s eco-partner and very first seed feeder Ecosia.

The Berlin based search engine, which claims to have planted more than 100 million trees across the globe in the last 10 years, will ensure that every $60 spent with a TreeCard will lead to the planting of a new tree in a threatened area.

‘We believe directing the flow of consumer finances is the most powerful way to affect change,’ claims Cox. ‘We’re building a finance company that allows consumers to not just to do less damage with their spending, but to actively improve the world.’

Before going live and being flooded with applications for wooden cards, TreeCard is aiming to break the US and EU markets where interchange fees are significantly higher than those of the UK. That way the company can maximise profits and make an even greater contribution to reforesting the planet.

It’s truly exciting to see fintech companies innovating with savvy ways of combating climate change. In December last year, Klima gave people the power to offset their carbon footprints and to go entirely neutral with a few clicks of a button, and with TreeCard we’ll have a simple way of combatting deforestation on a mass scale.

In a world where not everyone can’t afford to strike every Friday, nor to put solar panels on their roofs, its innovators like TreeCard that will help to generate popular solutions and make a difference on a grand scale.

When you’re talking minimal change for maximum sustainable impact, it’s hard not to be on board.

Senior Writer London, UK

I’m Jamie (He/Him), the Deputy Editor and a Senior Writer at Thred. Keeping up with social media updates and revolutionary technology is my forte, but when away from my keyboard, you’ll probably find me wrapped around a large Tango ice blast at the latest mediocre horror flick. Follow me on Twitter, LinkedIn and drop me some ideas/feedback via email.

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