How is global financial governance changing over time in relation to climate change? While carbon border adjustments or tariffs are increasingly well-known as a disruption to international trade, scholars have taken a less comprehensive view of how heterogeneous climate actions affect global financial governance. We argue that both asset differentiation (varying financial terms based on environmental effects) and cross-national friction have increased over time and seek explanations for how this change has taken place. We find, descriptively, that state and non-state actors respond in different ways to the rising salience of climate change through four types of activities: national economic policies, intergovernmental coordination, carbon accounting, and climate-conscious financing. A conventional explanation of resultant changes is a vertical, top-down model in which policymakers first set policies and then market participants react accordingly. Our key theoretical claim is that the vertical model is not sufficient on its own; instead, a horizontal model (or transnational model) involving heterogeneous action by actors at all levels is also required to explain the contestation and oscillation of practices. Together, the vertical and horizontal models of change can best account for the observed shift in financial governance.