How BlackRock and JPMorgan Made Net Zero the CFO's Job

The world spent 2025 quitting net zero.  In October the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, once the proudest club in climate finance, voted to shut itself down, the formal end of an exodus that had begun a year earlier when JPMorgan, Goldman and the rest of Wall Street filed for the exit.

The walkout ran through the summer as HSBC, UBS and Barclays let their memberships lapse.

A South Pole survey found 58% of companies had taken to "greenhushing", keeping their climate goals to themselves as the political weather turned against them.

When even BlackRock's Larry Fink, who made ESG the boardroom's favourite three letters, stopped saying them out loud, the direction of travel was hard to miss.

But the exodus told only half the story. The appetite for net zero never actually left. It changed departments.

In the same year the alliances emptied, the Science Based Targets initiative, the body that vets corporate climate goals, counted more than 10,000 companies with independently validated targets, up 40% on the year before.

Firms had not lost faith in the destination. They had lost faith in the marketing team to get them there, so the job passed to the people who run the money.

From the Stage to the Spreadsheet

The rules were pushing the same way, no longer willing to leave climate as a voluntary flourish. California went first, as it tends to, with a law called SB 253 that asks any large company operating in the state to measure its emissions, then, from 2027, put the figure through the same audit as its accounts. 

Europe's Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive casts the net wider still, making thousands of large companies, foreign firms included if they sell enough into the bloc, file audited sustainability reports next to their financial accounts. 

Washington drafted a version of its own before losing its nerve, but between the reach of California and the European Union, a serious company now treats its emissions the way it treats its revenue: as a number it has to stand behind.

For years, net zero was the sustainability team's to carry. They set the ambition, learned the science, built the first carbon inventories, mostly without much help from anyone else in the building. What they could not do was give those numbers the weight of the financials. 

That is why nine in 10 CFOs told Accenture they expect ESG back again at the centre of their job within five years and why, Protiviti found, climate climbed CFOs' priority list faster than any other issue.

The new carbon auditors

Producing an audit-proof carbon number is hard, specialist work, beyond what most finance teams can manage alone. So they are now leaning on a new breed of vendor, the carbon software firms that have become a kind of second auditor for emissions. Their market has swelled to US$28bn, growing better than a fifth a year.

The firms in front look less like environmental campaigners than like fintechs, offering the one thing finance truly wants – figures solid enough to survive an audit, wired into the systems it already uses. 

None of this makes net zero simple. A bank that quits an alliance still finances what it finances; an audited target is not a target met. But the centre of gravity has moved. What began as a CEO's promise, delivered from a stage to applause, will live out its adulthood as a line in a spreadsheet, owned by finance, checked by an auditor, priced by a lender.

The pledge, it turns out, was always the optional part. The disclosure is not.

Watershed and market's front-runners

Three vendors sit furthest ahead, and each has aimed its pitch straight at finance.

Watershed built carbon accounting for companies that get audited. Founded in 2019 by former Stripe employees, it has become an enterprise standard for measuring and cutting emissions, and its client list is pure finance, four of the top six US banks, six of the top 10 private equity firms, plus BlackRock, Visa, Stripe and KKR. Last valued at US$1.8bn, it has raised around US$185m from backers including Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

Its pitch is aimed squarely at the CFO. Watershed sells "audit-grade" data, granular and documented enough to survive an auditor, then bolts on dedicated software for Europe's CSRD and California's disclosure laws. Every customer footprint that has been through third-party assurance has passed, the company says, across the 1.9 gigatonnes of CO2e now measured on the platform.

"The vast majority of carbon footprints that are done the traditional way have some sort of material misstatement," says Co-Founder Taylor Francis.

Persefoni and climate disclosures

Persefoni aims straight at Wall Street. The Arizona firm calls itself the "ERP of carbon", and its sharpest edge is financed emissions, the far larger footprint of everything a bank or investor funds. That problem is the reason climate reporting unnerves finance chiefs, and Persefoni built for it first, producing "investor-grade" data mapped to the ISSB, California's SB 261 and the CSRD.

A partnership with climate-data firm First Street lets users price physical risks such as flood and wildfire against specific assets.

Led by Co-Founder and CEO Kentaro Kawamori, it has raised about US$179m and says it has reached the profitability much of climate tech still only promises. The wager is pointed, that whoever owns the carbon sub-ledger for financial institutions owns the most valuable seat in the market.

"Carbon and climate disclosures will be the biggest compliance market since the advent of Sarbanes-Oxley and GDPR, but with even greater complexity," says Kentaro.

Sweep and Europe's global standard

Sweep plays Europe's game, and Europe's rules set the global standard. The French platform goes beyond carbon to capture the full sprawl of ESG data the CSRD now demands, from supply-chain emissions to social metrics, in a single system. It was the only tool to score full marks on all 18 criteria in a CSRD benchmark run by French employers' federation MEDEF, and analysts at IDC rate it a leader among carbon-management tools.

It reports across the CSRD, ISSB, SFDR and the GHG Protocol, and counts enterprises such as energy group SSE among its customers.

For a European finance chief, that scope is the point. The CSRD demands hundreds of audited data points slotted into the annual report, not a single carbon figure. Sweep's bet is that sustainability and financial reporting are merging into one, and that Europe, not Silicon Valley, will set the terms.

"The political noise is actually separating serious businesses from the opportunists," says Co-Founder and CEO Rachel Delacour.

The Top 10 Net Zero Vendors

1. Watershed: audit-grade carbon platform trusted by four of the top six US banks, built for CSRD and California assurance.
   
   
2. Persefoni: self-styled "ERP of carbon", built for financed emissions and investor-grade disclosure.
   
   
3. Sweep: CSRD-native platform handling carbon and the full sprawl of ESG data for European enterprises.
   
   
4. Normative: the science-based carbon accounting pioneer, now a 2026 Verdantix Green Quadrant leader.
   
   
5. IBM Envizi: enterprise environmental data management that funnels 500-plus data types into one auditable system.
   
   
6. Salesforce Agentforce Net Zero: emissions tracking built into Salesforce, rebranded around AI agents (formerly Net Zero Cloud).
   
   
7. Microsoft Sustainability Manager: carbon and ESG tracking baked into the Microsoft cloud stack.
   
   
8. Workiva: assured ESG and financial reporting in one system, wired straight to the annual report.
   
   
9. Sinai: ties carbon accounting to financial planning, scenario modelling and internal carbon pricing.
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10. Plan A: Berlin-based decarbonisation and CSRD platform pairing software with science-based guidance.

Net-Zero software has grown up 

What began as spreadsheets and consultants has hardened into an audit-grade category worth around US$28bn in 2026 and growing better than 20% a year, as finance teams demand carbon numbers that survive the same scrutiny as the accounts. Four of the top six US banks already run Watershed.

The driver is regulation, not idealism. California's SB 253 and Europe's CSRD force large companies to report emissions and, from 2027, have them assured, which is why the platforms winning talk to CFOs about controls, boundaries and sign-off rather than to marketing about promises.

The market is consolidating, too. Venture-backed leaders like Watershed and Persefoni are racing the incumbents, with Salesforce rebranding its tool Agentforce Net Zero and Microsoft, IBM and Workiva folding carbon into the systems finance already runs. The question is no longer whether to buy carbon software, but whose sub-ledger becomes the system of record before the first assured filing lands.