The University of Cambridge is beginning to divest from UK banks which fund the fossil fuel industry, having moved £135 million already, according to Bloomberg.
The figure includes the movement of cash and investments from major banks and other financial institutions, as part of the University’s campaign for academic institutions to invest in an environmentally conscious manner.
Sources that spoke to the publication said the money would be moved to European asset managers, with a larger focus on sustainability. One such example is Amundi, which was chosen by various universities, including Cambridge, to create an eco-friendly money-market fund in October 2025.
Organisations set to lose the University’s business include Barclays, which, according to data compiled by Bloomberg, has been involved in $7.4 billion of support for fossil fuel companies so far this year. The University also currently banks with HSBC, which has made deals worth $5.3 billion involving fossil fuels, as well as NatWest and Lloyds, which have done the same to the value of $300 million.
Approached for comment, Barclays directed Varsity to its press release on sustainable finance, in which it states: “Barclays facilitated $98.5bn of Sustainable and Transition Finance in 2025, a record year,” and “Since 2020, Barclays has mobilised over $500bn of sustainable and transition finance.”
NatWest told Varsity that although they cannot comment on specific organisations, “NatWest’s approach to energy supply sectors reflects the diverse needs of the energy transition and the broader direction of the national policy agenda.”
They continued: “in August 2025, NatWest was ranked #1 according to the BloombergNEF 2024 Energy Supply Banking Ratio, putting the bank as one of the top performers relative to limiting fossil fuel financing relative to low carbon finance.”
The Cambridge-led association of universities and colleges calling for divestment have named various banks that should be used. One of these is Handelsbanken, which has reportedly been approached by 20 institutions about investment over recent months.
The University pledged in 2020 to divest from fossil fuels by 2030, and cut its greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2038. The UK’s biggest banks have a target of net zero by 2050. The University will retain some of its deposits in these banks, but intends to significantly reduce its investment in them over time. Bloomberg said that pressure for British universities and banks to keep, and meet, their net-zero and sustainability goals shaped the decision.
In 2022, a Varsity investigation found that 20 out of Cambridge’s 31 colleges banked with Barclays, which at the time was the seventh biggest investor in fossil fuels globally, having spent $144.9 billion on related investments since 2016. Student activists from both Oxford and Cambridge criticised the findings, calling them counterproductive to net zero targets.
More recently, findings from The Climate League of Oxford and Cambridge’s ranking of colleges based on climate action penalised several colleges for banking with Barclays and Lloyds.
A grace was put forward in 2022, calling to end all sponsorships and collaborations with companies involved in the fossil fuels industry. In response, the University commissioned a report, published in 2023, which recommended “an amended form of the Grace,” to balance climate action with “academic freedom and freedom of speech.”
Aside from reducing its investments, the report also recommended that the University streamline its assessment of which companies are sustainable enough to accept investment from, and reduce the threshold for doing so, to sustain research funding.
HSBC and Lloyds were contacted for comment.