Your business bank is probably funding what you're trying to avoid

Somewhere in your onboarding paperwork, back when you opened your business account, there was a line about "corporate values." Nobody reads that line. It doesn't matter — the bank reads it for you, decides what it means, and then does whatever it wants with the deposit sitting in your operating account.

What it usually wants to do is lend it to the fossil fuel industry.

The world's largest banks financed fossil fuel companies to the tune of roughly $906 billion in 2025 — an 8% increase on the year before, at a moment when every other signal says the direction should be reversing. Since the Paris Agreement was signed, that same group of banks has put an estimated $8.7 trillion into oil, gas and coal. Three names top the list: JPMorgan Chase at roughly $58 billion for the year, Bank of America at around $47 billion, and Japan's MUFG also around $47 billion — up more than a fifth in a single year. Twelve banks — informally, the "dirty dozen" — now account for close to 40% of all fossil fuel financing across roughly 2,000 banks worldwide.

The part that should actually worry an operator

The fastest-growing category isn't upstream drilling. It's midstream — the pipelines, storage terminals and trading infrastructure that lock fossil fuel supply chains in place for decades. Financing there jumped 84% year over year. That's not a bank quietly continuing old commitments; that's fresh capital actively extending the runway of the industry your concept is trying to position itself against.

And the regional picture matters if you're choosing where to bank. European banks were the most likely group to actually reduce fossil fuel financing this year. US and Japanese banks moved the other way — US banks alone now account for roughly 32% of global fossil financing, up from 28% just a few years ago, making them the single largest source of fossil capital anywhere.

Why this is an operations problem, not a values problem

If your concept talks about ecological responsibility anywhere in its story — the menu, the guest experience, the brand — and your operating account sits with one of the dozen biggest fossil financiers, that's the exact same gap as the plastic bottle in the eco-lodge bathroom. It's invisible to guests day to day, right up until someone checks, and then it's the only thing they remember about you.

The fix is more straightforward than most operational changes: switching business banking providers typically takes far less time than people assume, usually a matter of weeks, not months, and ethical banking alternatives — mutual banks, cooperative banks, and providers with published, audited lending policies — exist in most markets now with business account products built for exactly this. It won't show up on a menu or in a guest review. It'll show up in whether the story you're telling actually holds up when someone pulls the thread.

What to actually ask before you switch

A bank that's serious about this will publish its lending policy — which sectors it excludes, how it defines "fossil fuel exposure," and how often the policy is reviewed. A bank that isn't serious will point you to a general sustainability statement with no numbers in it. Ask for the number. If they can't give you one, you have your answer about how substantiated that "values-aligned" language really is.

It's also worth asking what happens to deposits specifically, not just what the bank publicly funds through its investment arm — retail and business deposits are often pooled and lent out through entirely different channels than the ones highlighted in a sustainability report, and the two don't always match.

Most operators never check where their deposits go, because nobody ever asks them to. That's precisely why it's worth becoming the kind of business that checks.