Missing, Not Absent
Something is missing in financial services marketing. Not absent. Missing.
Let's start with retail. Patagonia. I know; a jacket company and a bank are not the same kind of business. If a jacket company loses its nerve, or its money, people go buy jackets somewhere else. Nobody's rent goes unpaid. If a bank loses its nerve, or its money, people can lose access to their savings, their mortgage, their ability to make payroll. So when you compare how much a company sacrifices for its principles, the size of the sacrifice isn't the only thing that matters. You have to ask who was standing closest to it when it broke.
We'll start with the jacket company anyway.
Chouinard fixed his number in 1985: one percent of sales to grassroots environmental groups, years before there was a certification to chase. Then in 2022 he gave the company away. The Patagonia Purpose Trust holds the voting stock, the Holdfast Collective gets every dollar of profit not reinvested in the business, roughly $100 million a year, permanently, toward the climate fight. "Earth is now our only shareholder," the company said. Chouinard made that decision, and Chouinard paid for it. He lost control of a $3 billion company, on purpose, and he's the only one who felt it. When the person who decides and the person who pays are the same person, you don't need a complicated test. You just look at what they gave up.
Financial services, mostly, hasn't done anything like that. It landed on the same one percent, but by certification instead of conviction, meaning they picked it because a program existed to make it official, not because someone decided it and then bled for it.
Mostly. Not always.
Triodos Bank, founded in the Netherlands in 1980 runs its loan book under an exclusion policy, not a values statement: no fossil fuel extraction, no arms manufacturing, no gambling, full stop, whatever the return looks like. It also publishes its entire loan book, the only bank that I know of that does, and its app has a GPS feature that shows you the actual solar rooftop or organic farm your deposit is funding a few kilometres away.
It also isn't owned by ordinary shareholders. Triodos is owned through Depository Receipts, a structure built to keep the bank's mission from being outvoted by whoever's willing to pay the most for a stake. That structure cost something. DR holders had almost no ability to trade their holdings for years after a 2019 regulatory restriction. In 2024, Triodos set aside €101 million to settle with them, which is most of why the bank posted a €3 million net loss that year. Strip that charge out and the underlying business made €71.9 million, with €24.1 billion in assets under management, 84 percent of it in what Triodos calls triple-bottom-line assets, screened for financial, social, and environmental return at once.
None of that is what makes the marketing feel different. It's the reason the marketing is allowed to be plain. There's no gamified savings streak, no rewards tier, because none of it is needed to make the case. The loan book already makes it, in public, in real time.
The structure was built to protect a principle.
The structure cost money.
The principle held.
Put that way, it looks like Patagonia. But of course, it isn't, quite. When Chouinard's decision cost $3 billion, Chouinard was the one who lost it. When Triodos's structure locked up, the people who lost something were tens of thousands of ordinary Depository Receipt holders who'd bought in because they believed in the mission, not people who'd built it. They held certificates they couldn't sell. When trading reopened in 2023, the price had fallen from eighty-four euros to twenty. The €101 million wasn't Triodos absorbing a loss the way Chouinard did. It was Triodos repairing harm its own protective structure had caused to people who never made the decision in the first place.
A jacket company that gets its ideals wrong sends people to buy jackets somewhere else, which is mildly annoying and over by the weekend. A bank that gets its structure wrong sends people back to whichever institution never asked them to believe in anything, and takes years of their savings' liquidity with it. The stakes were never symmetrical. Calling Patagonia and Triodos the same experiment, just because both paid a cost for their principles, misses what actually matters: whose money it was, and whether they agreed to risk it.
Which gets you closer to why this type of banking is rare. And it isn't really a greed story.
A bank has to stay solvent. It has to hold a hard line on what it won't fund. And it has to be fair to the people who trusted it with their money. Those three things don't reliably pull in the same direction. Triodos held the first two. The third is the one that gave way, and €101 million is what it cost to admit that.
That's the test. A commitment that doesn't cost anything isn't a commitment. It's positioning. You can only tell what a bank means from what it turned down when turning it down was expensive, and from who was standing closest when the bill came due.
Financial services isn't missing the appetite for this. It's missing the willingness to pay for it. Triodos proves the difference isn't absent. It's just rare, because almost nobody in the sector has been asked to prove it, and fewer still would pass.
Naming that doesn't make more banks pay for it.
It gives you something to check for, and something to be suspicious of when it's missing.