Wintrust Bank
Last Rated in Apr 2025
Your bank falls short in climate responsibility.
Wintrust has not been entirely transparent about its lending activities, so we cannot rule out that it finances the fossil fuel industry. However, as the majority of its commercial lending is to small businesses, we think this is unlikely.
We'd like to see Wintrust put in place an explicit policy stating it will not lend to fossil fuel companies. We would also like to encourage it to start lending to renewable energy companies and projects and to introduce "green" products for retail (individual) customers.
We'd also like to see the bank measure greenhouse gas emissions enabled by its lending and set science-based climate targets over those emissions.
Your bank may be ignoring the Paris Agreement.
The Paris Agreement set the goal to stay under 1.5°C of warming for very good reasons. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an increase of just a couple of degrees more could lead to "substantial species extinction, large risks to global and regional food security", and an inability to work outside — or even live — in some areas of the world. Our world will become unrecognizable as ocean dead zones, floods, and extreme weather fuel social and economic disruption.
Start to Bank Green Today
Banks live and die on their reputations. Mass movements of money to fossil-free competitors puts those reputations at grave risk. By moving your money to a sustainable financial institution, you will:
Send a message to your bank that it must defund fossil fuels
Join a fast-growing movement of consumers standing up for their future
Take a critical climate action with profound effects