Home Capital Raising & Corporate Finance More Trillion-Dollar US Banks Expected as Consolidation Accelerates
Author: Anthony Noto | Photos: Illustrated with Canva
Lighter regulation and excess capital are setting up the biggest U.S. banking wave since the 2008 crisis.
The U.S. banking industry is bracing for its most significant wave of consolidation since the 2008 financial crisis, according to a new Bain & Co. analysis .
The firm expects the number of trillion-dollar U.S. banks to grow from the “Big Four” — JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., and Wells Fargo & Co. — to as many as seven by 2030. Key drivers include lighter regulation, burgeoning tech and 17 global banks holding over $10 billion each in excess capital. That capital cushion, Bain argues, will lead to a spike in M&A activity.
Banco Santander SA’s August acquisition of Webster Financial Corp. serves as an early example of what could be in store for U.S. banking giants. For Joe Lischwe, a partner in Bain’s financial services and customer strategy practice, the deal illustrates how capital-rich banks are leveraging eased regulatory conditions to combine geographic scale with targeted scope. In this scenario, Santander gets Webster’s health savings account franchise.
“We think there’s a window within this current [Trump] administration over the next two to three years where this will continue to be accelerating,” Lischwe told Global Finance on a call. “You will see more consolidation over the next few years.”
Seventeen U.S. banks currently hold more than $10 billion in excess capital — a figure Lischwe said Bain compiled from a mix of public quarterly filings and third-party data sources, including Refinitiv.
Bain also found that total bank M&A deal value rose 19% in 2025 and is up another 7% so far this year.
“There’s been an uptick in the actual deal value that has been occurring,” Lischwe added. “But I think, probably, the biggest tailwind is from a regulatory perspective.”
The Trump administration continues to move on multiple fronts that matter most to M&A-hungry banks, the latest being on Sept. 17 when the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation’s (FDIC) proposed new guidelines to make bank mergers easier and faster to approve.
Not all acquisitions are created equal, according to Bain’s framework, which sorts bank deals into two categories. “Scale” deals expand a bank’s existing footprint — deposits, branches and geographic reach — and generate value primarily through cost synergies.
“Scope” deals, meanwhile, bring in capabilities the acquirer doesn’t already have. Bain predicts that these blended scale-and-scope deals will emerge as the standouts. Capital One Financial Corp.’s acquisition of Discover , which gave Capital One a payments network it previously lacked, produced outsized total shareholder returns on a two-year basis, Lischwe said.
Fifth Third Bancorp’s purchase of Comerica , by contrast, was a more traditional scale play — consolidating similar deposit and branch businesses — without adding new capabilities.
“In general, we were seeing that blended deals, on average, performed better,” Lischwe said. “That’s not to say that scale deals don’t do well.”
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