At Gen E, we empower people to make a positive impact on the planet through Climate Action With Every Transaction. The Gen E community supports climate solutions and environmental causes by pledging donations tied to everyday purchases.
To enable this feature, you link a Purchase Tracker, which is our term for the credit or debit card where you make everyday purchases that are used to calculate your micro-philanthropy pledges. You’ll link a Purchase Tracker by logging in to your preferred account to establish the connection, and soon after you’ll begin to see transactions pull into your Gen E app. It’s easy and takes a minute. And as a reminder, once a month we charge your Funding Source with the total sum of pledges tied to the purchases made on your Purchase Tracker. For more account FAQs, go here.
In order to facilitate this service of purchase-driven micro-philanthropy, we rely on an open finance ecosystem that supports consumer-permissioned data to be shared with third-party apps, like Gen E. This is made possible thanks to our partner, Plaid – ‘a technology platform that modernizes banking infrastructure—making it possible to build products that leverage financial data’. Chances are you’ve already used Plaid’s technology in some of your favorite apps. If you use a popular payments app to send money to friends, automated savings app, or micro-investing app, you’ve likely leveraged Plaid.
The technology and applications born out of open finance have transformed the way we engage with our personal finances. Millions of people use fintech apps today, and a recent study conducted by Plaid found that 73% of American consumers say fintech is the “new normal”. To keep up with our changing behaviors, the data-sharing ecosystem has been rapidly expanding and improving as more and more financial institutions work to give consumers what they want – control of their data.
All that said, it’s important to note that across the spectrum of financial institutions, variability does exist in terms of how, when, and if data is transferred. For instance, some institutions are not yet fully onboard, some have longer delays for when they share data, some schedule data transfers exclusively overnight, and some are very quick. We’re rooting for the latter to prevail as standard practice! But right now on the journey to perfect, the state of open finance is pretty good overall for the many fintech companies that rely on it.
At Gen E, we want you to have the best possible micro-philanthropy experience, so we will keep you updated on known issues with connectivity to specific institutions. Email us at support@generationenvironment.com with account questions.
