Major Banks at the Crossroads: Climate Commitments Crumble as Fossil Fuel Financing Surges
June 23, 2025
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5 mins read
U.S. banks have dramatically increased fossil fuel financing in a notable contradiction with the narrative established after COP26. According to the 2025 Banking on Climate Chaos report, compiled by the Rainforest Action Network and its partners, global banks significantly scaled up their support for the fossil fuel industry in 2024, with a staggering $162 billion increase, pushing total financing to $869 billion.
U.S. institutions are at the forefront of this backslide. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo accounted for one-third of global fossil fuel financing, approximately $289 billion. JPMorgan alone provided $53.5 billion, a 35% rise in funding that placed it at the top of the global list. Bank of America and Citi each contributed over $44 billion, while Barclays led among European banks, increasing its lending by 55% ($35.4 billion).
Why the Sudden Surge?
This resurgence coincides with the political shift in the U.S. following the Trump administration’s departure from the Paris Agreement and weakened climate policies. In parallel, several major banks have exited the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, prompting environmental groups to accuse them of “walking away from climate commitments.”
What This Means for Climate Risk
The spike in fossil fuel financing carries profound implications. First, it increases banks’ exposure to climate liability risk. A Financial Times analysis cites growing concerns that banks may face litigation due to their financing practices in relation to climate change. Second, funneling money back into carbon-intensive sectors undermines global efforts to limit warming to 1.5 °C; long-term goals rest on systemic transitions away from fossil fuels.
Public Relations vs. Funding Reality
Banks have defended their actions by emphasizing fossil fuels and clean energy investments. JPMorgan, for instance, claims it invested $1.29 in green energy for every dollar in fossil fuel financing. Nevertheless, critics argue that green financing claims ring hollow when fossil fuel funding is simultaneously ramping up.
Rebuilding Credibility in Sustainable Finance
The disconnect between words and actions is a challenge for the financial sector. With growing scrutiny on climate claims, stakeholders demand greater transparency and accountability. Greenwashing has evolved from a reputational issue to a regulatory one, impacting trust and market access. Banks that emphasize climate commitments while increasing fossil fuel investments risk losing credibility. To maintain stakeholder confidence, a genuine transition to clean energy financing is crucial. Trust now hinges on consistent actions rather than just marketing promises, allowing us to build a sustainable future together.
SESAMm’s AI Technology Reveals ESG Insights
Discover unparalleled insights into ESG controversies, risks, and opportunities across industries. Learn more about how SESAMm can help you analyze millions of private and public companies using AI-powered text analysis tools.
PARIS, January 28, 2021 — SESAMm, one of the leading providers of analytics and artificial intelligence solutions for investment professionals and enterprises, has concluded a Series B funding round for over €7.5M led by the Fintech VC fund of NewAlpha Asset Management and global investment firm The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG).
The investment is intended to accelerate SESAMm’s global growth, allowing it to acquire talent and expand operations in Europe, Asia and North America. Plans for the funding also include developing AI-enabled research tools and dashboards for corporate customers, as well as continuing R&D investment in its Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing tools.
SESAMm will also extend its reach and address new market segments and use cases, including private equity sourcing and portfolio monitoring as well as Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) investing and risk screening.
SESAMm’s sustained performance and this new funding confirm its leadership and technological edge in AI and alternative data for the investment management sector. SESAMm’s CEO and Co-Founder Sylvain Forté’s shares his confidence in the company’s future:
“We understand our customers’ needs and challenges in using Big Data and AI effectively in the investment process. We launched our products TextReveal and SignalReveal to provide clients with relevant and actionable data and models, and plan to continue to improve these products in terms of speed, features, and addressable use cases as we did with our ESG monitoring analytics”.
“We’ve been very impressed with the market traction SESAMm has gained in the last few years” said Lior Derhy, Managing Partner at NewAlpha Asset Management. “SESAMm’s cutting-edge technologies and analytical tools have proven their effectiveness in meeting financial institutions’ market needs.”
As one of SESAMm’s major clients, Carlyle quickly moved from pilot to scale and has had access to the company’s innovative alternative data solutions since the start of 2020.
“Expanding our partnership with SESAMm builds on Carlyle’s continued leadership in leveraging big data, data science, advanced analytics, and machine learning to further differentiate our investment platform,” said Matt Anderson, Chief Digital Officer and Managing Director at The Carlyle Group. “We look forward to continuing to work with SESAMm to provide additive insights for our deal sourcing, diligence, and to help guide our portfolio companies in value creation.”
Havenrock, AngelSquare, La Caisse d’Epargne, BPI, and Banque Populaire, all early investors in SESAMm, are again participating in this funding round.
“We are particularly pleased to see SESAMm grow steadily and acquire new clients in the US, Europe, and Asia. They have been able not only to adapt but to grow in these difficult times. Their next steps are now focused on scaling, recruiting, and most of all expanding internationally,” said Omar N. Barakat, President of Havenrock.
Located in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Tunis and Metz (France), SESAMm works for a large array of blue-chip clients including large asset managers, banks, and hedge funds to identify opportunities in both fundamental and quantitative investment strategies. The company recently welcomed Dale Richards (previously President of Enterprise Data Management at Sungard and board member of Quandl) and Jonathan Neitzell (former Chief Data Officer at Goldman Sachs AM) as new board advisors, joining Mark Garbin (Independent Director, US Funds) in supporting SESAMm’s strategic decision-making and market expansion in North America.
About NewAlpha Asset Management
Globally recognized as a leading investor in Emerging Manager investing, NewAlpha sources, analyses, selects and supports innovative investment funds and high potential Fintechs. NewAlpha offers its institutional clients a wide range of tailor-made products and services in the areas of Private Equity and Absolute Return strategies. In 2015 NewAlpha launched a Private Equity investment activity specializing in technology-driven sectors including Venture Capital (primarily FinTech, Insurtech and AMtech) and Growth Equity (TMT, health and industrial niches).
Regulated by the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), NewAlpha Asset Management is a subsidiary of La Française AM (Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe group)
The Carlyle Group (NASDAQ: CG) is a global investment firm with deep industry expertise that deploys private capital across three business segments: Global Private Equity, Global Credit and Investment Solutions. With $230 billion of assets under management as of September 30, 2020, Carlyle’s purpose is to invest wisely and create value on behalf of its investors, portfolio companies and the communities in which we live and invest. Carlyle employs more than 1,800 people in 30 offices across six continents. Further information is available at www.carlyle.com. Follow Carlyle on Twitter @OneCarlyle.
About SESAMm
Founded in 2014, SESAMm is an innovative company specializing in big data and artificial intelligence for investment. Its team builds analytics and investment signals by analyzing billions of web articles and messages using natural language processing and machine learning. With its NLP platform TextReveal and its quantitative data science platform SignalReveal, SESAMm addresses the entire value chain of alpha research. SESAMm’s 50+ person team in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Tunis and Metz (France) works with major hedge funds, banks and asset management clients around the world for both fundamental and quantitative use cases.
As regulatory demands grow and ESG expectations evolve, financial institutions face a critical question: Is sustainability compliance merely a cost center or can it drive measurable financial and competitive advantages?
Watch this on-demand webinar to hear Gwen Safa, Global Head of Sustainable Corporate Solutions at Barclays Investment Bank, and Sylvain Forté, CEO of SESAMm, offer actionable insights on transforming ESG challenges into strategic opportunities.
Together, they unpack:
Why leading firms are reframing ESG as a value driver, not just a regulatory obligation
How to navigate the ESG backlash while staying aligned with long-term investor and stakeholder expectations
Where ESG meets reputational risk and why both are critical to financial performance and trust
Whether you're managing risk, sourcing deals, or building client trust, this session offers a candid look at the shifting role of ESG and what it means for the future of finance.
If I told you that I had a crystal ball and could predict the future, you’d probably laugh in my face. But what if I told you that this crystal ball could give you seemingly invisible data indicating what the future is likely to be, helping you make better investment decisions? Did your ears perk up? I bet they did.
Alternative data, specifically natural language processing (NLP)-generated alternative data, is like a crystal ball. It can help portfolio managers, analysts, and public equity investment managers make better decisions by identifying controversies about a company or potential investment before mainstream data providers and ESG rating firms can. That means you can take data-informed actions before a possible change in your investment value occurs.
That was a lot, so before we go further, let’s cover a quick basic as a refresher.
What is alternative data?
Alternative data is non-traditional information extracted from non-traditional data sources, such as internet social media communities and deeper-level article data. This subset of big data is often nonfinancial and unstructured.
Why use alternative data for finance?
In financial services, alternative data sets give investors insight into the investment process and guide their investment strategies. For example, quant hedge fund managers, asset managers, and private equity firms use alternative data to augment conventional data like those that come from quarterly financial statements and SEC filings. This unconventional data can reveal insights such as metrics on environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) information, sentiment analysis, and consumer behavior.
Where does alternative data come from?
Firms, such as data vendors or alternative data providers, find raw data from various sources, depending on the details you need. For instance, they can pull data from transaction data, like credit card transactions, text data from social media platforms and obscure media publishers. They can also extract information from technologies like satellite imagery and geolocation data, IoT sensors, web traffic, app usage, and new data sources yet to exist. All to say, alternative-data sources are found anywhere unconventional, valuable data live.
How does NLP-generated alternative data differ?
NLP-generated alternative data is more than raw data collection and presentation. Instead, it reveals the hard-to-see data and interprets it so you can make better decisions. At SESAMm, for example, we generate alternative data from text using NLP algorithms on a massive, ready-to-use data lake to identify noteworthy trends. Our developers and data scientists then use their machine learning technology to analyze these trends and build investment strategies for our clients.
How can alternative data identify controversies before mainstream providers and ESG rating firms?
There are two main ways alternative data identifies controversies before mainstream providers and ESG rating firms:
First, NLP-generated alternative data’s inherent quality is that it can reveal trends that mainstream providers and ESG firms can’t. And because of this quality—the ability to identify and analyze trends—you can use it to see warnings before a major controversy hits the mainstream.
Second, rating providers can be inconsistent and inaccurate, according to Andrew McLaughlin, a contributor to The Globe and Mail. He states that many ESG rating providers, for instance, are “popping up like dandelions,” and “each uses its own methodologies to rank and score publicly traded companies based on their purported environmental, social and governance risk and performance.” Further, “[their] reports produced are at times rife with inaccuracies,” McLaughlin says. While we at SESAMm might not agree with McLaughlin completely, we believe that alternative data helps bridge the gap between possible shortcomings and a more comprehensive view of an investment’s risks and opportunities.
2 NLP-generated alternative data use cases as examples:
Ericsson (ERIC) analysis
Event: On February 16, 2022, Ericsson investigates an in-house bribery scandal tied to ISIS. According to FIERCE Wireless, “investors reacted to reports that Ericsson may have made payments to the ISIS terror organization to gain access to certain transport routes in Iraq.”
Results: Ericsson’s share value dropped by at least 15% that day as news broke and investors reacted. “It was its biggest share drop in a day since July 2017,” per FIERCE Wireless.
What did NLP-generated alternative data see?
In Ericsson’s case, we analyzed three areas from January 2016 to the event on February 16, 2022:
Name-mention volume
Sentiment polarity
ESG Initiatives Score
Figure 1: Volume over time chart for Ericsson
In Figure 1, we chart our analysis of data volumes, indicating spikes to help detect significant positive or negative events. For instance, the payment scandal similarly affected mention volume as a controversy in 2020. Mentions related to the more recent events continue to increase, making it potentially Ericsson’s most controversial issue so far.
Figure 2: Polarity over time chart for Ericsson
In Figure 2, we analyze Ericsson’s polarity over time. Polarity represents the aggregate of positive and negative sentiment (opinions, reviews) on a company. It can range from -1 to 1. A 0 score means that as much positive as negative sentiment is expressed. High e-reputation brands can have polarity scores over 0.7, based on SESAMm’s research and findings.
Ericsson’s overall polarity sits in the average range for the most part. However, we found that Ericsson’s sentiment suffered significant negative drops caused by controversial news. In other words, the company’s reputation has been affected several times over the years, with the most recent controversies going viral and perceived as very negative.
Figure 3: ESG Score over time for Ericsson
In Figure 3, SESAMm used the analyzed areas and comparisons to compute an ESG Score based on proprietary ESG initiatives data. The scale ranges from 0 to 1, with zero indicating a low and undesirable value and one having a higher and desirable value. We score Ericsson in the 0.05–0.10 range, which we think is relatively low for this company. Despite Ericsson increasing its ESG initiatives over the past year, recent controversies have affected its score negatively.
Figure 4: Ericsson’s ESG risks over time compared to its stock price
Figure 4 charts Ericsson’s ESG risk, which is based on SESAMm’s web data. The range varies from 0 to 1, zero indicating the lowest risk and one as the highest. Ericsson’s score from its latest scandal is a 1. Compared to Ericsson’s stock prices, several spikes in ESG risk anticipated market movements.
Orpea SA (ORP:FP) analysis
Event: On January 24, 2022, Le Monde published an article about the book “Les Fossoyeurs”. According to Le Monde, the book concentrates most of its attacks on Orpéa, a top nursing homes and clinics company, employing “65,000 employees in 1,100 establishments across the planet; 220 nursing homes in France alone.” The book’s author attacks the “Orpea system” and reveals reported elderly abuse and deaths possibly caused by it or negligence.
The media begins to question the limits of ESG rating because of Orpea’s scandal.
Results: Two things occurred after the news broke. One, Orpea’s stock price sustained a 44-point drop. Two, the media begins to question the limits of ESG rating, given Orpea’s rating at the time.
What did NLP-generated alternative data see?
In Orpea’s case, we analyzed three areas from January 2016 to the event on February 16, 2022:
Name-mention volume
Sentiment polarity
ESG Initiatives Score
Figure 5: Volume over time chart for Orpea
In Figure 5, we analyzed volumes of data and compared them with significant events detected. Volume spikes detect clear, negative events in Orpea’s case. For instance, on January 24, 2022, the breaking news had the highest effect since 2016. It’s worthy to note that an upward mention trend becomes visible before the scandal emerges, with volumes reaching levels higher than average.
ESG scores, which range from 0 to 1, are relatively low for Orpea on average. Its controversies have strongly affected its scores in 2018 and 2022 in particular. But the trend to see in the chart is that Orpea’s ESG score had been trending downward for several months before Le Monde’s breaking story.
Figure 8:Orpea’s ESG risks over time compared to its stock price
Figure 8 charts Orpea’s ESG risk, which is based on SESAMm’s web data. The range varies from 0 to 1, zero indicating the lowest risk and one as the highest. Ericsson’s score from its latest scandal is a 1. Compared to Orpea’s stock prices, several spikes in ESG risk anticipated market movements. The current controversy, while very viral, represents a risk equivalent to the 2018 revelations.
Summarizing SESAMm’s Ericsson and Orpea findings
NLP-generated alternative data was able to see trends and events that mainstream ESG rating firms didn’t in the Ericsson and Orpea cases. In both cases, SESAMm would’ve flagged controversies in at least three key areas, name-mention volume, sentiment polarity, and ESG Initiatives Score. And these three areas, with additional proprietary analysis from SESAMm, would’ve provided much-needed insight to investors before their respective market-moving events had occurred.
How SESAMm’s NLP-generated alternative data can help you
Whether for fundamental, quantitative, or quantamental investment use cases, to monitor your corporate risks, or to conduct advanced due diligence on private companies for investment opportunities, explore limitless possibilities using SESAMm’s industry-leading data lake. Our data lake consists of nearly 20 billion articles today, and it’s growing by 20% every year. And if our data lake is our crystal ball, then TextReveal® is what fuels its magic. The data, in conjunction with TextReveal’s NLP algorithms, can reveal alternative data, such as emotion and sentiment data and ESG and risk metrics, on more than 70 million entities like:
Assets
Brands
Product reviews
C-level people
And more
And you can easily access valuable alerts and predictive insights—from live daily or historical data—through dashboards, APIs, or flat files delivered in usable formats. Are you ready to uncover the invisible data about your investments? Request a demo today.
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