Here are five takeaways

We’ve taken important steps to improve how we engage with our clients to steer and support their progress in the transition.

We’re working to make a bigger impact through our client engagement. We’ve put a data-driven assessment and decision-making process in place that means a step up in how we advise and support Wholesale Banking clients with sustainable business transformations.

We have developed a tool called ESG.X that has collected publicly disclosed climate data on around 2,000 of our largest clients, including those in the most carbon-intensive sectors. It looks at data including their current emissions, their targets, and whether there are action plans, governance and strategy in place.

We then generate a ‘client transition plan’ score that clearly shows where the client stands on how much they disclose. These scores are now incorporated into our transition risk assessment and transaction approval processes.

We intend to expand the kinds of data we capture through ESG.X, and to make the tooling externally available to help accelerate the efforts of our peers and clients to meet their transition goals.

We want to work with our clients on their climate transitions. But if they’re not doing enough and aren’t willing to change, we’ll consider ending our relationship.

Our client engagement starting point continues to be inclusion first, based on the belief that we can make the most impact by financing the technology and solutions for a low-carbon economy. We are here to support clients – including the high emitters – in transitioning their businesses.

We will use the ESG.X tool as part of our client engagement approach to track and assess what clients are disclosing each year. We’ll continue making improvements to the tool to obtain more and higher-quality data.

As of 2026, after two years of disclosure assessments and more strategic engagement with our clients, we’ll have a more robust understanding of how they’re progressing. For those that remain unable or unwilling to progress, we will, on a case-by-case basis, apply stricter credit conditions on the type of business we want to do with these clients, or cease financing them altogether.

We’re taking new steps on our energy financing.

As a bank, ING can have the biggest impact by supporting clients with their transitions to net zero while financing the technologies and solutions needed for a sustainable future. This includes limiting financing to activities that emit the most carbon. In this, we follow science and global guidelines, which also consider energy affordability and security.
Over recent years we’ve taken important steps on our oil & gas policy, like no longer financing projects for new oil & gas fields and the infrastructure that supports them; and also deciding to completely phase out financing to upstream oil & gas by 2040.

As of today, we take the next step by stopping all new general financing to pure-play upstream oil & gas companies that continue to open new fields – so, including general corporate financing and bonds.

We also announced a next step on LNG driven by guidance from the International Energy Agency. LNG is natural gas that gets cooled down to liquid to make it easier to transport. We will stop providing new financing for new LNG export terminals after 2025.

We’ve expanded our approach to more sectors (again).

Terra is our approach to steer the most carbon-intensive parts of our loan book towards net zero by 2050. This year, eight sectors are (almost) on track to meet climate goals on time, with two sectors behind schedule.

In the past year we’ve expanded our Terra approach to cover aluminium and dairy. We’ve included aluminium because producing it is highly emissions-intensive but it’s fundamental in many decarbonisation technologies, like solar panels, windmills, electric vehicles and batteries. As for the dairy sector, it’s one of the main emitters of greenhouse gases within the food value chain. As a member of the Net Zero Banking Alliance, ING has committed to disclosing our plans for the transition of the agriculture sector, food value chains and aluminium.

To successfully fight climate change, action is needed at all levels of society. That’s why advocacy and collaboration are such a big part of our approach.

We want to use our voice and our influence to accelerate progress, share our learnings, and show our actions. This includes sharing what actions we believe governments and policy makers need to prioritise, based on our sector insights. We also want to collaborate with all those who have a role to play, and together with our partners advocate for the change that needs to happen.

We play an active role in climate standard-setting and direct our resources to where our contribution will have the most impact. We’ve collaborated with RMI’s Center for Climate Aligned Finance to help develop methodologies that can be used by financial institutions and sector participants to benchmark their own alignment with net-zero goals.

In addition to contributing to the Poseidon Principles for shipping, the Sustainable STEEL Principles and the Sustainable Aluminum Financing Framework, we’ve recently adopted a new and better methodology for aviation, called the Pegasus Guidelines.