PNC Financial Services
PNC
Financials
2
exclusion reasons
2 themes
This page is part of our public exclusion list — a transparency tool that shows which companies we screen out and why. It is not investment advice, and it is not an accusation. But it is subject to change as our understanding of the facts evolves.
In December 2013, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) and the Department of Justice filed a joint complaint against National City Bank — now part of PNC Bank — in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania, alleging discriminatory mortgage pricing. Between 2002 and 2008, National City charged higher prices on mortgage loans to African American and Hispanic borrowers than to similarly creditworthy white borrowers. The proposed consent order required PNC Bank, as National City's successor, to pay $35 million in restitution to harmed borrowers. The discriminatory pricing was not isolated to a single branch or market — it was a systemic pattern spanning six years of lending in which minority borrowers were steered into higher-cost products or charged discretionary pricing overages not justified by credit risk. The case was one of the CFPB's early fair lending enforcement actions and established that successor institutions inherit liability for acquired banks' discriminatory practices.
The 2025 Banking on Climate Chaos report documents PNC Financial Services providing $56.9 billion in financing to the fossil fuel industry between 2021 and 2024. In 2024 alone, PNC provided $15.3 billion, of which $6.9 billion went to oil, gas, and coal companies actively expanding fossil fuel production. PNC increased its fossil fuel financing by 77% between 2021 and 2022.
PNC is among the major banks that funded the Mountain Valley Pipeline alongside Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo, and BNP Paribas. BankTrack identifies PNC as one of the 10 U.S. megabanks financing companies with leases to frack Ohio public lands. Between 2016 and June 2023, Reclaim Finance documented $3.8 billion in PNC financing to the fossil-steel industry, ranking it 41st globally. The bank has expanded its environmental finance pledge to $30 billion, but this commitment has not constrained its fossil fuel lending — the two financing streams run in parallel.
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Companies appear on our exclusion list based on our investment judgment — not because they've done anything illegal. This is a difference of values and opinion, not an accusation of wrongdoing. Exclusion does not constitute a recommendation against investing in any company, and absence from the list does not constitute a recommendation to invest.
This information is provided for educational and transparency purposes only and should not be relied upon as investment advice. Data is drawn from independent watchdogs, NGOs, government registries, and Ethical Capital's ongoing research — see Research Sources for the full list.
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