What's new and what's coming - A letter from our founders

Since day 1, our vision has been to build a reward system for sustainable consumption. Today's release of our Open Banking Beta marks an important milestone in our journey, but also a turning point in PLAN3T's young history.

When we started thinking about creating an impact startup to build a solution that makes it easier for people to make environmentally-friendly consumption choices, there were three findings that drove us to actually start PLAN3T.

Why we founded PLAN3T

First, thanks to the Fridays For Future movement, social engagement around the climate crisis was at its peak, and in parallel, we were seeing new, supposedly sustainable startups in every industry promising to make the world a better place.

We asked ourselves "what does sustainable actually mean, which alternatives are really better for our climate" and: "how can we make this transparent for everyone?" All these questions led us to the third finding, and finally to the decision to found PLAN3T.

When we were looking at different approaches to solving this problem, we came across a then freshly adopted EU directive in payment services law while searching for methods to calculate CO₂ emissions of products and services. PSD2.

What is PSD2 and what does it have to do with climate protection?

What sounds like a boring directive for banks and other financial institutions is an important driver of innovation and technological progress, not only for the financial industry. Simply put, the directive states that banks must grant third-party providers reading access to the transaction data of the respective account, as long as this is desired by the account holder.

In the search for ways to reward consumers for sustainable purchasing decisions and to suggest environmentally friendly alternatives, PSD2 seemed to us like a real game-changer.

Why not start with a bank integration right away?

PSD2 represented an important piece of the puzzle in the conception of our vision, but at that time there was no technological infrastructure that allowed us to immediately use the legal standard. Developing the infrastructure would not have been feasible for us three founders, without large amounts of capital.

Therefore, after some user tests, we decided to start without bank integration and to develop a first app version, inspired by fitness-tracking apps.

Since then, 12 months have passed and a lot has happened. At PLAN3T and regarding the infrastructure around PSD2.

Impact must be scalable

In the meantime, our app has been downloaded around 10,000 times and more than 60 sustainable partner companies reward our users for their commitment with vouchers and give-aways. Users who regularly use PLAN3T reduce their carbon footprint by more than 10%.

You might think everything is great. But it is important for us to be honest and to become a little bit better every day. This data-driven way of working includes questioning and reinventing ourselves again and again if the situation requires it.

Following our pre-seed funding round last fall, we decided together with our team that we wanted to use the capital raised to focus even more on our original vision in the future. To build a reward system for sustainable consumption. Technology-based, scalable, and effective for the planet.

One of the consequences of our decisions was that the CO₂ compensation and challenges features will no longer be available. A tough decision. The CO₂ compensation may find its way back into the product in the coming months. You will find the content of the challenges in the tips section in the future.

Green Cashback - our Open Banking Beta is live

For the last four months, we have been working daily to completely rethink PLAN3T and are more than happy to present the new PLAN3T beta version to you today.

To participate, you first need to download the PLAN3T app and sign up for the beta there. With the secure linking of your bank account, you will get access to these new features in under three minutes:

🍃 Green Cashback

For every recognized transaction in the past 90 days, you will receive up to 5% cashback from participating partner companies.

📉 Automatated CO₂ Tracking

Track the carbon footprint of each transaction and understand how much CO₂ your consumption decisions produce each month. The calculation is done in cooperation with EcoIncome and will be improved step by step in the coming months.

🌳 Donations

From now on you can donate your Planet Coins to climate protection projects. New effective projects are waiting for you every month.

💳 Premiums

In addition, you get the opportunity to pay for selected products of our partners with your Planet Coins. Be curious where the journey still goes.

In order to receive cashback in the future and possible exact CO₂ data, you should make sure that the payment methods are linked to your bank account stored in the PLAN3T app. This usually includes EC cards, credit and debit cards, or bank transfers.

What's next?

In the coming months, we will first test the new features of the beta version for a few weeks and then make them available in Germany and Austria.

Over the course of this year, we plan to significantly refine the CO₂ tracking feature to recommend sustainable alternatives that measurably reduce CO₂ emissions.

To offer the benefits of our app to as many people as possible, we plan to launch in other parts of Europe early next year. Thanks to PSD2, we can theoretically already integrate with more than 3,400 European banks and more than 800 German banks. Your bank is sure to be among them.

But for now, we're toasting the release and the next milestone and looking forward to your feedback.

Lukas, Kaspar & Chris.