Amsterdam-based digital bank bunq offers the opportunity to plant a tree for every €100 spent with its SuperGreen premium account. Now bunq has planted 1,000,000 trees.

Read also: Bunq enters the mortgage market with initial loans worth 100 million euros

Ali Niknam, CEO and founder of bunq, has been an enthusiastic programmer since childhood and studied computer science at Delft University of Technology. He founded the web hosting startup TransIP in 2003, when he was only 21 years old.

(mc4wp_form id=”2736″)

With his money from TransIP, Niknam decided to start bunq. Since 2012, over 433 million euros in user deposits have been processed.

As mentioned above, for bunq’s SuperGreen premium users, a tree is planted for every euro spent. This is done through a partnership with Eden Reforestation Projects. These trees capture 308 kg of CO2 during their average lifespan of 25 years and are located at a special location in Madagascar.

The reason for planting trees in Madagascar is that it is important to plant trees in an equatorial climate as this provides the most efficient CO2 uptake opportunity all year round.

By planting 1 million trees, bunq has planted just enough trees to offset more than 325,000 flights from New York to Paris.

The company now operates in 30 countries across Europe. Funded by Niknam’s previous business success at TransIP, the company has been able to operate without a cent of venture capital funding, something almost none of bunq’s competitors have managed to do.

“At bunq we want to make it easy to be green. That’s why we are the only bank in the world that allows you to become completely CO2-free in less than 2 years,” explains CEO Ali Niknam