Watchtower: A New Tool For Exposing Greenwashing In Finance

At Bank.Green, our mission is simple yet ambitious: shift banks away from financing fossil fuels by empowering customers to advocate for meaningful, sustainable change. We believe transparency is a powerful force. When people understand their banks' true climate impacts, they can demand accountability and push for greener financial practices.

Over the past few years, Bank.Green has successfully built a reputation for clear, accessible ratings on banks' climate performance. To date, we've rated over 800 banks across the UK, US, Canada, Australia, and Ireland. These ratings, available on our platform, have already empowered over 500,000 bank customers to assess the climate responsibility of their banks, redirecting over £40 million toward greener alternatives.

Yet, as we engaged deeply with bank policies and actual financing practices, we identified a worrying trend: many banks pledged publicly to support sustainability but continued quietly funding fossil fuel projects. This contradiction, known as greenwashing, undermines genuine climate action and leaves customers feeling misled. How could customers and stakeholders hold banks accountable if policies remain opaque and contradictory?

This challenge led to our development of Watchtower, an innovative AI-driven tool explicitly designed to expose greenwashing in finance. Thanks to a generous grant from our funding partner, Bank.Green built the initial prototype to tackle this critical gap between policy promises and financing reality.

How Does Watchtower Work?

Watchtower simplifies and analyses complex banking policies, cross-referencing them against actual financing data. When discrepancies emerge—such as a bank funding a coal project despite a public pledge to phase out fossil fuel investments—the tool flags these as potential breaches of policy

For example, if a bank publicly promises to exclude clients expanding coal, oil, or gas facilities, Watchtower consults detailed corporate data online to determine if funded companies engage in such expansion. Any financing events found that potentially breach this commitment trigger immediate flags. These insights can then directly inform advocacy by climate NGOs, reporting by journalists, and regulatory oversight.

The value of Watchtower lies not just in highlighting policy breaches but also in its forecasting abilities. By analysing bank sustainability commitments and detailed fossil fuel project data, the tool projects the future availability of financing options for companies heavily reliant on fossil fuels. For example, if a corporation generates 50% of its electricity from coal without meaningful transition plans, Watchtower can identify which, if any, financing options might still be available to that company in the future. Such insights illustrate how limited such opportunities could become, potentially nudging corporations to proactively adopt greener practices.

Real-World Data Powers Watchtower

Watchtower's insights are only as powerful as the data feeding it. We're currently incorporating real-world financing information from authoritative sources like The Banking On Climate Chaos Report and datasets generously provided by German climate finance NGO Urgewald. These datasets offer comprehensive insights into global banks’ fossil fuel financing activities, allowing Watchtower to deliver accurate and timely assessments.

Right now, Bank.Green is in the process of expanding Watchtower to cover all 60 major global banks featured in The Banking on Climate Chaos report. We’re also enhancing the tool’s capabilities beyond corporate financing to include project-level finance, broadening its impact and accuracy significantly.

The Ambition Behind Watchtower

The goal behind Watchtower is straightforward: provide stakeholders with powerful, actionable evidence to confront and reduce greenwashing. Whether it's supporting NGOs in advocacy, helping ESG investors minimise risk, or empowering regulators to enforce transparency, Watchtower serves as a cornerstone tool for climate accountability.

Future developments include enabling frontline activists and stakeholders to fight on-the-ground projects with the help of a paralegal-like sustainable policy chatbot. We're also planning to expand Watchtower's monitoring capabilities to cover insurers, pension funds, and asset managers—sectors often overlooked in climate accountability discussions but critical to financing fossil fuels.

Additionally, we envision a dedicated dashboard specifically for regulatory bodies, offering continuous, year-round tracking. Such real-time oversight could significantly strengthen enforcement actions and regulatory scrutiny of banks' sustainability claims.

A Step Forward in Tackling Greenwashing

Transparency and accountability remain critical tools in addressing climate change. With Watchtower, Bank.Green has taken a decisive step in bridging the gap between sustainability promises and reality in financial institutions. By equipping stakeholders with clear, actionable insights, we drive banks toward genuine, verifiable climate action.

Watchtower’s development continues actively, informed by the real-world financial data we gather. As we scale this tool, our goal remains firmly fixed: transform the financial landscape by eliminating greenwashing, promoting transparency, and ensuring banks finance a genuinely sustainable future.