neon green

neon green: your green, digital account

With neon green, we’re launching a pilot project for a green, carbon-neutral banking product for everyday use. And you can help design it from the get-go! We’ll use your feedback to make neon green even better and even greener over the next few months.

Here’s how the project works:

We’re keeping things simple, to start with: your digital neon green account balances out your CO2 emissions, based on your expenditure with your neon green Mastercard. In other words:

• As an early adopter, you’ll receive a digital private account based on our everyday account, neon free. It’s won several awards, including from Kassensturz and moneyland.ch.
• In addition, we’ll plant a tree for every 100 CHF you spend with your neon green card. Put another way, you can plant trees whenever you pay with your neon green Mastercard when you’re out and about. This is how we directly balance out some of the impact that your spending has on the climate. In a nutshell, it’s a product for anyone who wants to do more for the climate (and for people who would forget to do their bit on a day-to-day basis).
• In the app, you can see the number of trees that have been planted by you and the entire community.

And of course, it goes without saying that neon green gives you the same benefits as neon free. But green means expensive, right? Nope! With neon green, you won’t pay a cent in ongoing account fees or be hit with pricey currency conversion surcharges when you’re travelling. You’ll even get the neon Mastercard for free, too.

To mark the launch of neon green, we’re exclusively giving out a maximum of 1,750 of these Mastercards via wemakeit (and nowhere else!) to ensure we can develop the product within a suitable structure and in collaboration with our community. There are four different versions of neon green to choose from: there’s plain neon green, neon green & Cardholder, neon green & User Council and neon green & Oh Tannenbaum!

If you’re a fan of this idea and want to help make Swiss banking a bit greener, then lend us a hand!

Why are we counting on you?

We want to make Swiss banking more digital – and more sustainable, to boot. Why? Because consumption always involves using up resources. Every industry needs to play their part, and neon green is our first step in this direction. We want to become more sustainable and we want to make it as easy as possible for you to have a direct impact that matches your own consumption.

Our offsetting partners:

We all know the score: reforestation is a highly effective way to tackle climate change. That’s why we’ve decided to plant trees. The trees are planted by our partner, Eden Reforestation Projects, in countries such as Haiti, Indonesia, Kenya and Nepal. In the future, we might even consider launching our own tree-planting projects.

Plans to expand neon green’s range of functions:

Planting trees when you use your card – or in other words, simply offsetting CO2 emissions on the basis of your spending using the card – is merely the first step. We’d love to draw on your support and your input to keep improving neon green. As the second step, we’re hoping to expand neon green to include additional features and compensation options that align with your consumption. The product is intended to be completely carbon-neutral (including the plastic that the card’s made from, for example) so it can truly offer a greener, more sustainable banking option. neon green will be available to everyone, but it will be subject to a monthly fee.

DON’T FORGET: if you join us as an early-bird user, it’ll always be free!

What the money is used for, and how the offsetting is financed:

We use supporters’ money so that we can turn neon green into a standard product, without leaving the development of our neon free product out of pocket. The trees are partly financed by the support we receive from this, and partly by the revenue we generate from the use of the neon green card. This revenue comes in the form of interchange fees, and, as with all bank cards, these fees are borne by the merchant. We use neon green and neon free to earn money in various (transparent) ways, despite the ultra-low fees.

Banking benefits:

In addition, neon green also offers the following benefits – and neon’s already received multiple awards for them:

• An easy-to-use, intuitive account app and the ability to open your account digitally
• No ongoing account fees
• Make payments online and anywhere in the world with the neon green Mastercard
• No surcharge for currency conversion
• Swiss data protection and deposit protection (up to 100,000 CHF)
• Google Pay and Samsung Pay available (Apple Pay in progress)
• Scanner for pay-in slips and IBANs, plus eBills
• Carbon-neutral company
• Ecosystem with fintech partners such as Smile, Transferwise or our impact investing partner Yova
• Further information about the underlying product, neon free, can be accessed here: neon-free.ch