FAQs — OBaaC:

Open Banking as a Community (OBaaC) is a ground-up movement to reclaim consumer financial data and restore your climate agency. For decades, banks and corporations have used your transaction history to target you and maximize their own profits. OBaaC flips the script.

By securely aggregating spending data, we turn individual choices into undeniable proof of real demand for sustainable products, services, and the broader green economy. This collective evidence forces market accountability, drives private investment toward low-emission alternatives, and gives policymakers the mandate they need to pass bold climate regulations.

Rather than waiting for the green economy to arrive through slow political processes, imagine driving real climate action today—directly from your phone or online.

Currently, our political and environmental systems operate on an "In-Out" model. This is a top-down approach where a central authority (politicians, regulatory bodies) tries to push climate policies outward to the public. Because this central point is heavily influenced by corporate lobbyists, these policies are often watered down, scattered, and fail to deliver meaningful change. OBaaC proposes an "Out-In" model. Instead of waiting for top-down action, we start on the outside (individual citizens making sustainable choices). By aggregating our verified transactions, we drive a concentrated force of consensus inward to the center. When politicians see a massive, undeniable block of citizens shifting their actual wallets, it empowers them—and forces them—to pass bolder climate policy.

Why do people roll their eyes at the “carbon footprint”?

Because we've all been conditioned to view it as a corporate guilt trip. In 2004, BP popularized the consumer “carbon footprint calculator” as a PR strategy to shift blame onto individuals while they lobbied behind closed doors to block real policy change.

When people dismiss the carbon footprint as Big Oil propaganda, BP wins twice. But here's the truth: Big Oil didn't invent the carbon footprint.

It was created by ecologist William Rees as a scientific tape measure for Earth's natural boundaries. Your footprint was never meant to be an instrument of shame—it is your personal dashboard on a finite planet.

Governments treat “per-capita emissions” as an abstract, top-down statistic. We are taking that number back. By using bank data to measure and aggregate our individual choices, OBaaC transforms the carbon footprint from an invisible burden into a ground-up tool for collective market power.

OBaaC is an open, vendor-agnostic standard that connects via trusted open banking networks worldwide, including Plaid, TrueLayer, Tink, and Yapily.

Never Share Passwords: Authenticate directly with your bank. We never see or store your login details.

Read-Only "Valet Key" Access: Your bank issues a secure token that verifies specific green transactions without ever granting access to move funds or change settings.

Instant Revocation: Turn off data access whenever you want directly from your bank's app.

100% Automated Privacy: Zero human eyes look at your data. Applications like Climate Savers use automated code strictly to match valid purchases or update anonymous leaderboard metrics.

Yes, completely. Your individual banking data remains strictly private.

Before contributing to any public dashboard, all personally identifiable information (PII) is permanently stripped. Your transactions are aggregated into unified community metrics (e.g., "7,853 collective night train bookings") to demonstrate real market demand.

This turns isolated climate despair into tangible collective agency—without ever exposing who you are.