Presumably customer deposits are typically invested in short term government paper and reverse repos rather than corporates. I would expect this to be similar across all banks.
(Also I disagree with classifying defence companies as immoral. This is the sort of thinking that leads the west to be vulnerable to aggressive dictatorships).
You can look at banks' financial reports. Santander's (https://www.santander.co.uk/assets/s3fs-public/documents/Santander%20UK%20plc%202024%20Annual%20Report.pdf) says £60 billion in "Cash, repos, other financial assets and other assets non-interest earning" and £176 billion in customer deposits.
| This is a Draft Amnesty Week draft. It may not be polished, up to usual standards, fully thought through, or fully fact-checked. |
| I'm posting this to get it out there. I'd love to see comments that take the ideas forward. I wouldn't have posted without the nudge of Draft Amnesty Week. Fire away! (But be nice, as usual) I’m not using an Epistemic Status for this post - just think that this isn’t my field of expertise, though I did subscribe to the magazine Ethical Consumer for several years, but still might be wrong about this. Written for a UK perspective but can’t imagine other countries are immune to the incentives banks in the UK have. |
Hey EA Forum reader, what bank account do you use? Why do you use them? Is it because you signed up for them over a decade ago and haven’t thought about it since[1]? There’s a good chance that’s why.
Going back to earlier days of EA, it would look at cause areas as how neglected they were, how tractable they were and how important the area is.
It’s my view that moving banks hits the neglected and tractable goals, and skims perilously close to a threshold of importance. And when it’s so straightforward, it feels like an easy and worthwhile thing to do.
Banks, as you probably know, are the powerhouses of the economy, and lend money to people and businesses to fund projects and the like. Banks have a range of places they can invest their money, and some of these opportunities are worse for the world than others.
What kind of worse?
Banks typically and logically will invest your money into whatever is most profitable. A lot of the time that can be fossil fuels, weapons (including autonomous drones), deforestation causing industries, animal exploitation and tobacco.
As an example of how much funding goes into these sectors, the campaign Feedback found
“Between 2015 and 2020, global meat and dairy companies received over $478 billion in backing by over 2,500 investment firms, banks, and pension funds headquartered around the globe.”
And the Banking on Climate Chaos report shows the scale of fossil fuel funding[2];
But you can be sure that unless a bank has a policy against funding some of these, they will be doing it - even places like Natwest have “restricted” sectors that they continue to fund, with the only restriction being some additional audits. Some of these projects are “fully-autonomous armed unmanned aerial vehicles” and “non-harmful child labour” - what a phrase.
First and foremost you can be more confident that your money is not directly going to the net negative sectors discussed previously. The most positive evidence I could find for this is from moving your pension, which isn’t a million miles away from moving your bank account. Make My Money Matter state that changing your pension to green funds could decrease your carbon footprint by more than 21 times the combined effect of going vegetarian[3], stopping flying and changing energy providers, which frankly seems too good to be true (and my LLM of choice thinks that it is also too good to be true - it does suggest that’s a ceiling if the best case scenario of moving your pension works). For other measures of how your positive impact would change from switching banks, I failed to find much concrete data, this would be addressed in a follow up if I write it.
There’s also the chance of causing a sea change in the banking industry - A student boycott of Barclays in 1986 led to them to pull out of apartheid era South Africa [4]
Fortunately, in the UK, the current account switching service is available at the link. Your friend and mine Martin Lewis has a page on the best deals that are currently available for switching your current account - at time of writing (October 2025) there’s just Nationwide and Coop that offers a switching bonus, and are listed as one of the top 3 ethical banks by Ethical Consumer (see below).
It’s worth pointing out as well that if you have a current account that you like using, you don’t have to move that - just consider where your savings or stocks are kept. Wherever the bulk of your money is has the biggest effect through the bank.
Reviews of the switching service have generally been positive with people saying how easy it is. Consider that if you’re one of these people who stay with a bank for 17 years, even an hour of faff switching bank, would lead to 17 years of more positive impact with your money.
Here’s what I have noticed after trying to use ethical banks for a while;
My response to these
This list is produced by the magazine Ethical Consumer, which rates on a positive and negative rating out of 20. I have some issue with their rating (until recently, they marked “support nuclear power” as a straight negative) but I think it is a good ballpark.
Next on my to do list is changing your energy supplier
Resources;
https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/money-finance/shopping-guide/current-accounts
https://www.currentaccountswitch.co.uk/
https://www.comparethemarket.com/current-accounts/content/ethical-banking/
account holders are more likely to stay with their bank – typically for 17 years – than remain loyal to their husband or wife, (which illustrates my point but also shows a terrible return on investment for paying for the average wedding)
Switching banks: why are we more loyal to our bank than to a partner? | Current accounts | The Guardian (from 2013)
“A student boycott of the bank led to a drop in its share of the UK student market from 27 per cent to 15 per cent by the time it pulled out.” a percentage change which I find inspiring and probably frankly well outside of what system change we could cause at the present moment, but it gives a flavour of the scope of change that can be achieved with fairly easy steps. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/news/barclays-faces-apartheid-court-action-340003.html
My firing from the hip guess is that the lifetime effects of having more money to donate effectively dwarfs the extra harm caused by a bank investing slightly more money in bad things. The intuition mostly comes from the idea that a) the harmful investments aren't trying to cause the most harm, but your donations are (or should be) aimed at doing the most good, and b) I'd guess that if there is an evil thing with a good return, it'll be invested in anyway, whether your bank can do it or not (whereas a great charity with a good impact return generally has a major funding gap).
Keen to hear any updates I should make to my from-the-hip model here. I currently don't worry too much about what my bank does with my money, as long as I get a decent return.