A year of mass exits from voluntary climate coalitions redrew the map of climate leadership in banking, leaving a narrow field of European lenders and values-based institutions.
The architecture governing climate commitments in global banking was assembled in a single year and dismantled in another. Between December 2024 and October 2025, every major Wall Street institution, all six of Canada’s largest lenders, and eventually Europe’s biggest banks withdrew from the United Nations-convened Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which ceased operations on Oct 3, 2025. What remained was a smaller and far more clearly defined field. The greenest banks of 2025 were not those that had signed the most ambitious pledges. They were the institutions whose loan books could still withstand scrutiny once the pledges were gone.
That distinction matters well beyond the banking sector. Roughly 90 percent of energy investment worldwide is financed from corporate balance sheets rather than through project finance. This means commercial lending decisions shape the pace of electrification, the durability of fossil fuel infrastructure, and the energy security position of entire regions. When the voluntary framework governing those decisions dissolved, the question of which banks actually finance what stopped being a reputational matter and became a strategic one.
The Collapse That Reset the Baseline
The alliance had counted close to 150 financial institutions and tens of trillions of dollars in assets at its peak. Goldman Sachs left in December 2024. Its Wall Street peers followed within weeks, then Canada’s Big Six in early 2025. In April 2025, remaining members voted to remove the mandatory requirement that lending and capital markets activity align with a 1.5 degree warming limit. HSBC exited in July, Barclays and UBS in August, and by then combined member assets had fallen to about $42.2 trillion. The alliance closed in October and converted itself into a non-binding guidance framework.
Political pressure drove much of this. Republican state attorneys general in the United States threatened antitrust action against climate coalitions on the grounds that coordinated fossil fuel restrictions constituted a boycott. Those investigations were quietly shelved once the American banks had left. For European institutions, the calculus was different. The European Banking Authority issued binding guidelines on the management of environmental, social, and governance risks in January 2025, meaning European lenders faced supervisory expectations regardless of what any voluntary alliance required.
One departure ran in the opposite direction. Triodos Bank, the Dutch impact lender, left the alliance in April 2025 specifically because the weakened rules fell short of the urgency required to align portfolios with a 1.5 degree pathway. It remains the only member to have exited on the grounds that the standard had become too permissive, and the episode captured the year’s central irony: the greenest banks left the alliance for the same reason the largest ones did, and for exactly opposite motives.
Why the Greenest Banks Were Almost All European
Money flowed the other way through all of this. The 65 largest banks committed $869 billion to fossil fuel companies in 2024, an increase of roughly 23 percent over 2023 and the sharpest annual rise on record. Of that total, $429 billion went to companies actively expanding oil, gas, and coal production or infrastructure. Two thirds of the banks assessed increased their fossil fuel financing. American banks accounted for $289 billion, close to a third of the global total, with JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citigroup at the top. Barclays led in Europe at $35.4 billion.
Against that backdrop, a December 2025 forensic benchmark of Europe’s 25 largest banks produced an average score of 41 percent against the measures assessors considered necessary. Only four institutions cleared half the available points: BNP Paribas, Crédit Mutuel, La Banque Postale, and Rabobank. UBS scored 25 percent and Deutsche Bank 27 percent, the lowest in the group. Those four constituted, in practical terms, the greenest banks operating at systemically significant scale anywhere in the world.
La Banque Postale ranked first overall, driven by a first-place finish on fossil fuel policy. The French state-linked lender had committed in 2021 to end all financial services to the oil and gas sector by 2030, the first major bank anywhere to do so. It also recorded the lowest three-year average fossil fuel financing relative to total assets in the sample and the second highest ratio of clean power financing to overall fossil fuel financing, trailing only Crédit Mutuel. BNP Paribas ranked second, leading the field on decarbonisation targets and placing second on Indigenous Peoples’ rights safeguards, though it fell to 15th on biodiversity.
Those weaknesses were structural rather than incidental. Across all 25 banks, average performance reached 52 percent on climate themes but only 22 percent on biodiversity and 7 percent on Indigenous Peoples’ rights. Six of the 25 had set any biodiversity target at all. Only four fully excluded financing for companies pursuing new oil and gas projects.
The Values-Based Tier Operates on Different Terms
Below the systemically important lenders sits a category of institutions for which climate alignment is the business model rather than a policy overlay. The Global Alliance for Banking on Values grew to more than 70 financial institutions across 45 countries, serving close to 50 million customers with combined assets under management approaching $290 billion. Twenty-five member banks endorsed the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.
The scale gap is instructive. The entire values-based network manages roughly a third of what JPMorgan Chase alone directed toward fossil fuel companies over the four years to 2024. These banks demonstrate that a lending book can be built without fossil exposure. They do not yet demonstrate that it can be built at systemic scale, which is why any ranking of the greenest banks by absolute influence still resolves to large European lenders rather than to the values-based sector.
By narrower measures, the values-based tier dominates outright. Triodos scored 96 out of 100 in a leading consumer ethical assessment, outranking every high street and challenger bank in its market, and remains the only bank to publish the identity of every borrower in its lending and investing portfolio. Germany’s GLS Bank and Italy’s Banca Etica occupy comparable positions in their own markets.
Washington Dismantles Its Own Green Bank
The most consequential single action of 2025 was not taken by a commercial bank. In March, the United States Environmental Protection Agency froze and then terminated $20 billion in grants awarded under the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the federal green bank created by the 2022 climate and tax legislation. The money had been allocated across eight non-profit lenders, with Climate United Fund holding $6.97 billion and the Coalition for Green Capital $5 billion. A further $7 billion earmarked for residential solar deployment was terminated separately.
The programme had been designed to scale a model that state-level green banks in the United States had already used to enable $21.8 billion in clean energy lending. Its termination was contested in federal court through the year, and Congress subsequently repealed the enabling provision outright. The effect was to remove the largest single pool of publicly capitalised green lending in the world at precisely the moment private lenders were abandoning their own commitments.
From Pledges to Ratios
What replaced the pledge architecture was a metric, and with it a harder test for identifying the greenest banks. The energy supply banking ratio measures how much low-carbon energy financing an institution facilitates relative to fossil fuels. Across roughly 2,000 banks, that ratio stood at 0.89 to one for 2024, meaning 89 cents flowed to wind, solar, and grids for every dollar directed to oil, gas, and coal. Scenarios consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 degrees require four to one this decade. Measured more narrowly against clean power supply alone, the 65 largest banks managed 0.42 to one between 2021 and 2024, against a benchmark of six to one.
Shareholder pressure turned this into disclosure. Resolutions filed by the New York City Comptroller and by Canadian investor coalitions pushed JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Scotiabank, and Royal Bank of Canada to publish or commit to publishing their own ratios. Royal Bank of Canada recorded the lowest figure among major global lenders at 0.47. Disclosure spread further over the following year, and the greenest banks of 2026 would be separated from their peers on precisely this measure.
A Jurisdictional Question, Not a Corporate One
The year exposed something the alliance era had obscured. Greenness in banking was never primarily a corporate attribute. It was a function of the regulatory jurisdiction in which a bank operated and the political tolerance for climate-linked lending restrictions in that jurisdiction. When American political conditions turned hostile, American banks moved within weeks. When European supervisors made climate risk a prudential matter, European banks stayed the course whether or not any alliance existed.
For governments weighing how to finance electrification, grid modernisation, and industrial decarbonisation, the implication runs deeper than any league table. Private climate finance is not a durable substitute for regulatory architecture. It follows it. The countries that build the architecture will determine where the greenest banks are domiciled a decade from now, and where the capital for the energy system of the 2030s is arranged.
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