Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA)
A bank alliance formed in 2021 under the aegis of the United Nations, which voted to dissolve on October 3, 2025 after its main members left.
Banks finance the real economy, and their financed emissions far outweigh their own office emissions. The alliance committed its members to aligning their lending and investment portfolios with net zero by 2050, with published interim sector targets. It was the banking sister of the insurers' alliance, the NZIA, and of the asset owners' alliance, the NZAOA. Its fragility was legal as much as political: U.S. lawmakers argued that joint commitments to reduce financing to a sector could amount to collusion. Its collapse, two years after the insurers' alliance, showed that voluntary market-wide coordination does not survive an antitrust risk perceived by its most exposed members.
Launched in April 2021, the alliance counted more than 120 banks from 40 countries. The major U.S. banks left between December 2024 and January 2025, followed in January 2025 by the six largest Canadian banks; on October 3, 2025, the remaining members voted to end the alliance as a membership structure, while keeping its guidance published.
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