Atmos is...not quite a bank. They're a technology company that essentially provides a frontend to Evolve Bank and Trust. Thanks to that backing, money deposited with them is FDIC-insured, and in general, they behave like other online-only banks.

You may have seen other online-only banks in recent years; Ally is another that is better-known. They basically provide services that brick-and-mortar ones can do online; the main caveat is that there's not some physical location you can visit to deposit cash or handle other paper documents. So they are often best used alongside a more traditional bank, with the online bank's accounts being available to transfer money into and out of, usually to take advantage of a higher savings interest rate than is available at the user's nearby physical banks. The online bank is able to offer this higher rate in large part due to not having the expense of maintaining physical offices and the associated staff. The potential danger is that you are at the mercy of whatever customer service they offer remotely; you can't march down and talk to someone face-to-face to address any problems.

I am still just starting to use Atmos, so my review here is written from that perspective. They are also a fairly new operation, so there is not a huge amount that's been written about them yet.

Atmos' big selling point is their commitment to use the money deposited with them only to fund projects that are helpful for the environment (renewable energy and such). Banks without a climate-focused mission are free to use their funds to provide loans for any project that seems profitable, often with terrible environmental effects. Any bank-financed project, for good or ill, is funded by the people who keep their savings in that bank, so by keeping money in a climate-focused bank, users can ensure their money is being used responsibly.

Atmos is actually so new that they're still ramping up their ability to actually finance the projects they want to. Right now they claim my money is funding "10 utility-scale solar projects across the USA".

Their next-biggest selling point is the high interest rate on their savings account, which (like all other interest rates) has increased recently: 1.2% as the base savings rate as of this writing. This doubles to 2.4% if you set up recurring donations to one of many climate-focused nonprofits Atmos sponsors, either at 10% of the savings rate or $1 per month. So in practice your savings rate would be, at most, 2.16% or 2.4% minus whatever percent $1 works out to based on how much you have saved. This isn't the highest in the online-banking world, but it's still a lot more than brick-and-mortar banks are offering.

Hopefully, anyone using Atmos for climate reasons can probably find some nonprofit on that list that they're happy to give a little money to, or better yet, that they're already contributing to anyway and can just shift their giving to come directly from their savings account. Just swap the old recurring donation for the one through Atmos, and make sure deposits into savings can cover it.

The big question, of course, is whether you can actually use your money when needed. How easy is Atmos to use?

As far as setting up the account goes, expect it to take a few days. In order to unlock all their features, Atmos will want to verify your identity more stringently than most services you'd just sign up for online, and those checks take a day or two. Linking other bank accounts to Atmos can also take a couple days if your bank needs to use microtransactions to verify the connection--though that is less likely now that they've just added the ability to use Plaid.

For a while, my financial planning service was having trouble connecting to Atmos, but both are using Plaid now, and it's been working fine since they set that up.

It would also take time to get the Atmos debit card mailed to me, which I haven't even bothered with yet due to still using my standard bank for checking. But it turns out you don't necessarily need the physical card; they also issue you a separate debit card number that can be used for online purchases or entered into a payment app on your phone. Their card offers cash back on some sustainable brands, so that's worth looking into. A lot of the names on my "Green Things" list are on that list too. A lot of the choice comes down to how much shuffling-around of money you want to do to get the best rates. Is your purchasing so tightly-focused on approved brands that it's worth using one card for those, and another for other things? There are other cards elsewhere that offer good cash-back rates on purchases; Atmos' rates here are truly impressive only within a couple categories.

Aside from that, the numbers are all looking as they should, so stay tuned for updates. They are working to add more features such as business accounts and credit cards. Still, even if they expand a lot, the benefits of having some connection to a brick-and-mortar bank--or better yet, a local credit union--are too big to give up completely.

There is a particular feature Atmos has that seems fairly common among online banks, which is not common at brick-and-mortar ones: the ability to make several savings accounts, each with a unique name, for the purpose of saving for various specific goals. Other banks may conceptualize this as "partitioning" the one account; Atmos gives them separate account numbers. This is a really straightforward, concrete budgeting tool that I wish more standard banks would offer.

I will note that a lot of the climate-focused petitions crossing my inbox for a while have been targeted at insurance companies--the goal being to convince those companies not to insure new large oil-drilling and otherwise destructive projects. If those projects can't get insured, they can't happen. There is increasing attention on the people and companies who are actually profiting from the destruction of the environment, and Atmos is one of many such efforts to move towards more responsible use of money.