Consumer advocates warn Tomorrow

The Baden-Württemberg consumer advice center criticizes the fintech's "misleading advertising". Tomorrow has already reacted and adjusted the wording accordingly.

The smartphone bank Tomorrow advertised its premium account with the following sentences: "As a premium account, Tomorrow Zero is made for people with particularly high standards - in climate protection and banking." Underneath it says: "Your C02 footprint compensated".

Consumer advocates take issue with this statement because Tomorrow cannot know the individual carbon footprint of its customers. "Everyone has an individual carbon footprint because the product selection is never the same," says Niels Nauhauser from the Baden-Württemberg consumer advice center. "Such advertising claims are simply misleading."

Tomorrow has since changed the wording. However, the fintech did not even promise "that it was about the individual footprint", the company told the Handelsblatt. Tomorrow now advertises: "We use the account fee to finance CO2 certificates that offset the CO2 footprint of the annual German average of 11.17 tons of CO2 emissions per capita." The promise only applies to customers of the premium account for 15 euros per month, which includes a wooden debit card.

However, the consumer advocates are still not happy with this. "Average values are simply insubstantial for an informed and self-determined decision," writes the head office in a statement. Furthermore, Tomorrow is not a bank in its own right; customers' money is held by Solarisbank. "However, this bank publishes neither an annual report nor meaningful information on the sustainability of the use of funds on its website," criticizes Nauhauser.