Getting Started

bench connects to almost every bank in North America via our partner plaid.  Plaid allows you to securely connect and share data from your financial institutions with your bench app. Enabling you to transfer funds into your bench card from within the bench app. Tens of millions of people in North America have successfully connected their financial institutions to their apps using Plaid.  

Your bench card will arrive within 7- 10 business days of creating an account. In the rare event that you do not receive the cards within 11 business days, please contact your bench Member Services team on +1- 884-404-0472 so we can check its status. Our team is ready to help 24/7.  

As a financial service, we are required to ‘know’ our customers. We carry out a widely-used electronic check called a Know Your Customer check (eKYC) to comply with our regulatory obligations. We do this check at the time of sign-up, by matching your name, address and date of birth against a number of public record databases such as Ideology. This identity check is not a credit check and does not affect your credit score in any way, although it will show as a light address verification on your credit history. 

If you have lived at your address for less than 3 years we may not be able to validate your details online. If there has been a partial match then there will be an email be sent to you providing a link where you can upload your up to date driver’s license or State issued ID. Your address details on these documents must match the address you are using to sign up to our service. 

After this has been uploaded it will then take 24 hours for this information to be verified, you should then receive an email from bench letting you know that you have passed. 

Click any green Join button on the bench website or Let’s get started on the mobile signup page. You can get to the mobile page by scanning a bench member’s QR code.  

Signing up usually takes a little over 4 minutes, and we won’t take any payment details until you are ready to load your card. Visit the bench website or download our free app, click ‘Sign up’ and follow the prompts! Your bench virtual card will be issued immediately, and your physical card will be with you in the next 7-10 business days. It’s as easy as that.  

Once you receive the card, you’ll need to log into the website or app to activate your account and the plastic bench card. This is when you can set budgets, spending limits, top-ups, and features to help you manage your money.  

Remember! The contactless function won’t work until the first chip and PIN payment has been made.  

If you’re stuck, please give your bench Member Services team a call on +1- 884-404-0472, who’ll be happy to help you get started. We are available 24/7, so don’t hesitate to call us.  

bench is the easiest way to take direct action to save our planet. It is a membership subscription service with a Visa debit card and planet-saving mobile app that help you manage your money and protect our earth via our unique financial model. We use Forest Carbon Credits to lock up CO² and enable the preservation of forests and ecosystems. It also allows you to see how you are making a difference through our community platform and keep score of the CO² being locked up.

Your bench subscription account allows you to join millions of others using their payments for good. For full transparency, we record our carbon credit transactions on a blockchain for all our members to see. We want you to know what and how you are helping fight to save our planet.

We set out with a vision of making it simple and effective to save our environment without changing our day-to-day habits. Millions of people taking small actions every day to make a huge difference. That is why we started bench.

As the world’s only financial technology company created to stop climate change & protect our biodiversity, we’re on a mission to empower millions of people to collectively use bench for their day-to-day financial transactions to save our world. We put Earth First.

If you refer someone to bench then both you and your friend will receive 10 points onto your rewards accounts! Remember – it will you will only be credited once your friend has activated the account. Your points are accumulated to achieve status recognition levels and put you in the running for rewards. The Super-Spreaders, who are our top referrers, will be rewarded with experiential prizes like visits to the forest projects we work with.

Simply let your friend scan your personal QR code on your card or your app and they can follow the prompts.

If they aren’t with you, select ‘Refer a friend’ from the menu in your bench mobile app or website account. (You can also long-press your QR code in your app).
Choose how you’d like to share your unique link with your friends; by SMS, email, Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, Messenger and many more.

Your friend will receive 10 points once they have activated their account, and 10 points will be added to your rewards balance. The reward will be credited to the referer & referee accounts within 12 hours of activation.

If you wish to close your bench account, you’ll have a three day ‘cooling off’ period in which you can reactivate the account. After this time, it will not be possible to reactivate and should you wish to start using bench again, you will need to set up a new account. 

To close your account, please contact your bench Member Services team (who’ll be very sad to see you go, but very happy to help). Call us on +1- 884-404-0472 or pop an email to help@planetbench.com/card. We are available 24/7 to help. 

We’ll close your account immediately and arrange for any remaining funds on your card to be sent back to your bank account within 7-10 business days. If you need the funds prior to this, we recommend that you withdraw them from an ATM with the bench card. 

The monthly membership fee will be taken from your balance if the funds are available.    

In the event that there is not enough money on your account to cover the membership fee, we will retrieve them from the card attached to your account. With bench there are no commitments as you can cancel at anytime. 

However, if you spend just $180 with our loyalty/cashback partners your membership fee will be offset by the cashbacks you receive. 

bench was started to allow concerned consumers to actively save our planet we contribute the 1% of value of each transaction you make (that would normally come to us) to saving forests.
So we simply need to charge a small fee to keep the service running. We believe the unique features of our website, apps and card provide our community with the flexibility and convenience to manage your money AND take action to stop climate change and catastrophic biodiversity loss. For us, of just $1.99/week, conveniently billed at $7.96 monthly fee great value for money, and this is just the beginning.   

If we need to charge for something it’s because we are charged a fee and we need to pass it through to you.. 

However, where we can, we keep banking charges as low as possible and waive others. We work to keep the monthly membership cost to a bare minimum.