We analysed 1,858 bank sustainability reports. This is what we found.

The number that decides whether a bank disclosure means anything

When a bank publishes a climate report, the tables you see first are its own operations: electricity, flights, buildings. For Danske Bank, that operational side of the ledger comes to about 7,000 tonnes of CO2e. The financed emissions line in the same reporting is 52.2 million tonnes, which is 99.9 percent of the total. For Addiko Bank in Austria the split is 6,411 tonnes of operations against 574,942 tonnes of financed emissions, 98.9 percent of everything the bank causes.

So a bank that reports its flights and hides its loan book has told you almost nothing, while wearing the costume of transparency. That is why our scoring treats Category 15 as the hinge for every financial institution: report it and you are scored on your whole footprint; stay silent and we model the missing financed emissions from your sector and balance sheet, your transparency collapses, and your score goes to zero. Declaring the category "not applicable" does not help either. A lender has financed emissions by definition.

A bank that cannot tell you what its lending emits has not made a disclosure. It has made a brochure.

Financed emissions are not part of the footprint. They are the footprint.

This is not a quirk of a few examples. Across every financial institution in our production data that reports an absolute Category 15 figure, the pattern is the same:

Here is that split drawn for banks named in this post, Category 15 in green against everything else the bank reports, operations and all other scope 3 categories together, in grey:

Source: Mycelium production database, 17 August 2026. Each bar splits the institution's company-reported emissions for its latest reporting year: the largest reported Category 15 figure against the sum of everything else it reports (scope 1, scope 2, and all other scope 3 categories). Median is taken across all 555 institutions with a reported Category 15 figure.

That is the headline this dataset keeps shouting: for a typical disclosing institution, ninety-nine percent of the footprint is the loan book and the portfolio. Which is why a bank's operational carbon report, however beautifully assured, is a rounding error wearing a cover page.

How we read a bank's climate report

We analysed 1,858 sustainability, annual and climate reports from more than 1,600 financial institutions, page by page, against one question: did this institution print an absolute financed-emissions figure for the reporting year. Because a bank's whole verdict hangs on that one category, we hold it to a tighter evidentiary bar than any other line in our database.

Four rules make it tight. A figure only lands on Category 15 if the bank's own wording on the page corroborates it: financed emissions, portfolio emissions, emissions from lending and investments. The dedicated financed-emissions tables, usually published under the PCAF standard (the Partnership for Carbon Accounting Financials, the industry method for measuring financed emissions) and often sitting in an appendix or a TCFD report far from the main carbon inventory, get their own extraction pass so an appendix can never be overlooked. Overlapping totals and sub-portfolios never sum: we take the single largest figure the bank itself printed, so a total and its own components cannot be double counted. And nothing we compute ourselves ever masquerades as a disclosure: modelled estimates are labelled as ours, reported figures as the bank's, everywhere they appear.

Bank reporting earns this strictness. Multi-year pivot tables, baseline figures printed in parentheses next to the current year, units that switch from tonnes to millions of tonnes between chapters, sector tables whose own footnotes warn that the rows overlap: a loose reading of any of these produces a number the bank never published. Every figure named in this post has additionally been verified by a human against the bank's published report, down to the page.

The banks that actually say the number

Genuine Category 15 disclosure is the exception, not the norm, and 555 institutions in our financial group do print it, from global groups to single-country building societies. These are the hand-verified standouts, each figure checked against the page of the report it was printed on; the leaderboard below ranks the highest scorers among them.

The leaderboard

The fifteen highest-scoring banks in our financial services group, every one carrying a company-reported Category 15 figure verified against the printed page. The score dial is the same Mycelium Score mark the platform shows on every profile; the share column is the green bar from the chart above, per bank. For an independent second opinion we show each bank's rating from Bank.Green, a climate campaign that assesses banks on their fossil fuel financing policies with a completely different methodology from ours.

Source: Mycelium production database, 17 August 2026, after the full re-extraction and rescore. Score is the Mycelium Score (0 to 10); Category 15 is the bank's own reported financed-emissions figure for the scored year, in tonnes CO2e, verified against the report page it was printed on; share is that figure as a proportion of everything the bank reports. Reporting years differ per bank. Only banks and building societies appear; the wider financial group (insurers, asset managers, funds) is scored in the same table on the site. Two banks whose only reported Category 15 line covers a marginal sliver of the portfolio (under five percent of the reported footprint) are excluded. SMBC Bank International carries the Bank.Green rating of the SMBC brand. Bank.Green ratings retrieved 17 August 2026.

Notice who is here and who is not. A leading pack of mid-sized institutions from ten countries scores within a whisker of each other, and the majors that genuinely disclose follow close behind. Notice also what honesty costs under a scoring system that includes the whole footprint: Bank of America's 16.7 million tonnes of financed emissions is one of the biggest numbers in the table and drags its intensity, yet it still outscores every silent giant, because silence scores zero. And the two rating systems disagree in a telling way: NatWest tops the British contingent on our disclosure test while Bank.Green rates its fossil fuel policy "worst", and Metro Bank and Unity Trust Bank carry Bank.Green's top rating while sitting mid-table on ours. Why the two verdicts can point in opposite directions is unpacked below.

The biggest banks in the world, side by side

Transparency is easiest to admire in banks you have never heard of. So here are the fifteen highest-revenue banks on the planet, the institutions whose lending actually steers the global economy, checked for one thing: is there a company-reported absolute financed-emissions figure in their climate reporting on file with us? We also checked every one of them against the PCAF signatory register and read the disclosure reports PCAF hosts, so a bank does not get called silent because its number sits in a document we had not ingested yet.

Revenue ranking: company filings, latest full year. "Yes" means the bank prints an absolute financed-emissions total for its whole measured portfolio; "sector rows" means it prints absolute figures for selected sectors only, with no firmwide total (our scoring takes the single largest printed figure and never sums overlapping sectors); "none" means neither its reporting on file with us nor the disclosure report PCAF hosts for it prints a company-reported absolute Category 15 figure. Verdicts count documents we hold but have not yet processed ("in a report we hold"); each was read to the page. Several giants report sector intensity metrics instead of an absolute number; an intensity ratio is not a footprint. A dash in the score column means no scoreable report on file. Bank.Green ratings retrieved 17 August 2026; Mycelium columns refreshed 17 August 2026.

Read the score column. Four of the fifteen biggest banks on Earth print a financed-emissions total for their measured portfolio. Sumitomo Mitsui's 890.6 million tonnes, verified against page 88 of its Japanese-language report, is a number in the region of Japan's entire national footprint, because almost uniquely it counts its customers' own supply chains. Santander's 283.8 million tonnes hides in a footnote of its 2024 sustainability statement. Citigroup's 70.1 million tonnes sits in a Category 15 inventory line of its 2024 climate report, a document in our ingestion queue. Bank of America prints 16.7 million tonnes. Five more print absolute figures for a handful of target sectors and no firmwide number: JPMorgan's largest sector row is 84.4 million tonnes for its energy portfolio, HSBC's is 23.2 million tonnes for oil and gas, BNP Paribas prints 95.7 million tonnes across its regulatory Pillar 3 sectors, Morgan Stanley and MUFG print less. The remaining six, every Chinese giant plus Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs, print policies, intensity ratios or nothing at all. And the single bank Bank.Green rates above "bad" is BNP Paribas, one of the few with current-year absolute figures on the page. Two completely independent methodologies, ours built on what banks publish and theirs built on what banks finance, still converge on the same verdict: the bigger the bank, the less it says, and what it does say tends to be a slice, not a footprint.

Why we say good and Bank.Green says bad

The two ratings measure different sins, and the leaderboard shows both. Bank.Green rates what a bank finances: fossil fuel exposure, expansion funding, divestment pledges. We rate what a bank discloses: did it publish its financed-emissions number, credibly, for its whole footprint. A bank can be honest about a dirty portfolio, and a bank can be clean without publishing much at all.

NatWest is the honest-but-exposed case. It tops the British contingent on our test because it prints its financed emissions and reports with high transparency. Bank.Green still rates it "worst": by their reckoning NatWest has financed 27.4 billion dollars of fossil fuels since 2016 and, despite a strong renewables-to-fossil funding ratio, put almost a billion pounds of new money into fossil fuel expansion between 2023 and 2024. Saying the number does not clean the loan book.

Metro Bank and Unity Trust Bank are the mirror image. Both carry Bank.Green's top rating because they pledge not to fund fossil fuel extraction or fossil power at all, and Bank.Green has verified the pledges hold. They sit mid-table on our score because their disclosures are thinner than the leaders': a clean portfolio, more modestly documented. Notably, Bank.Green's own write-up of Metro credits it for disclosing its financed emissions "in line with the best available guidance". When the policy campaigners and the disclosure dataset start citing each other's virtue, that is the standard converging.

Where the two systems agree is the top of the revenue table, and the agreement is damning. The giants Bank.Green rates "worst" for financing, Bank of America's 333 billion dollars of fossil funding since 2016 among them, are overwhelmingly the same banks that publish no firmwide Category 15 figure. Policy and disclosure fail together. The follow-up post will run Bank.Green's entire "great" list through our Category 15 test.

What the numbers do not say

A reported financed-emissions figure is not automatically a complete one. PCAF coverage varies by portfolio, many banks quantify only their highest-carbon sectors, and data quality scores of 4 or 5 mean the underlying customer emissions are themselves estimates. A sector-only discloser like JPMorgan can print an 84.4 million tonne row for its energy portfolio and still leave most of its balance sheet unmeasured. Our scoring rewards saying the number and saying it credibly; it does not certify that the number captures every asset. That is the next frontier of this dataset, not a reason to excuse silence.

Look up your own bank

Every figure in this post links to a live Mycelium profile, and the same data covers more than 1,800 financial institutions. Search yours at mycelium.global/search. If its Category 15 line is blank, you now know exactly what that blank means.