Across Europe, financial institutions are essential partners in turning climate ambitions into tangible investments. Yet, as sustainability frameworks evolve and regulations tighten, banks face growing challenges in identifying, verifying and reporting on green investments.
Financed by the InvestEU Advisory Hub, the Green Gateway is an EIB Advisory initiative that helps financial institutions assess the eligibility and impact of green projects. It offers tools like the EIB Group Green Checker, along with a Green Gateway Helpdesk, webinars and other services. Green Gateway tools help EIB Group clients to channel funding for green projects.
The EIB Group Green Checker is an online tool that helps financial intermediaries assess projects against the EIB Group’s green eligibility criteria, estimate their environmental performance such as energy savings and download a customised report with the assessment results.
In 2025, Green Checker became the main tool for all EIB Group's financial intermediaries, by merging functionalities of the previously two separate websites – EIB Green Checker and EIF Sustainability Tool.
Other important developments of the past 12 months included the extension of the EIB Group Green Checker to other environmental objectives, namely to biodiversity and climate change adaptation, and the continued addition of assessment models with the current list of green investment activities and green enterprise activities standing at 50.
Thanks to these improvements, the EIB Group Green Checker usage also continues to grow, with over 37,000 visits to the website in 2024 alone, driven by both EU and non-EU institutions seeking to align their lending with EIB Group green finance standards.
More recent additions to the Green Gateway Advisory Programme include i) Green Gateway Helpdesk, which enables financial institutions to submit questions and receive fast responses to their ad-hoc green eligibility queries, ii) Green Gateway E-learning programme which allows staff of financial intermediaries partnering with the EIB Group to gain a deep understanding of green finance topics, at their own pace and time, and iii) Green Gateway webinar series, which spreads knowledge on green finance topics to financial institutions all across Europe.
The Green Gateway also offers bespoke advisory support to intermediaries to accelerate lending for climate projects. This support includes product development, portfolio screening, impact reporting, and training to enhance the intermediaries’ ability to screen and report on eligible transactions. This type of support has been so far provided to 43 financial intermediaries in 20 countries.
Strengthening green finance in the Netherlands
Within the EU, one of the most recent Green Gateway collaborations took place in the Netherlands, a frontrunner in the green transition aiming for climate neutrality by 2050. The country’s energy efficiency landscape is shaped by strict national regulations driving investment in fossil-free heating and insulation, while the circular economy is promoted as a national priority encouraging reuse, repair and recycling across the building and infrastructure sectors.
In this context, the ability of financial institutions to deploy green finance accurately and efficiently is essential. Between April and November 2024, EIB Advisory provided Rabobank with tailored advisory support to enhance the bank’s capacity to assess, approve and disburse green loans.
The collaboration focused on clarifying how Dutch national regulations and industry certifications can be applied to define and verify green projects, while also benchmarking sustainability certifications across agriculture, transport and the circular economy, promoting consistency in green definitions.