26 people who will change banking in 2026

Who will have the most impact on the banking, fintech and payments world in 2026? American Banker’s reporters and editors compiled this alphabetical list of the 26 people we expect to make a difference — positive or negative — for bankers in the coming year. 

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John Allison

Chairman and CEO, Home BancShares

Home BancShares in Conway, Arkansas, has returned to the bank merger-and-acquisition arena, and from all appearances John Allison, the company’s longtime chairman and CEO, couldn’t be more pleased. 

The $22.7 billion-asset Home announced plans to acquire the $1.8 billion-asset Mountain Commerce Bancorp in Knoxville, Tennessee, earlier this month. Industry observers were expecting a move by Home since Allison disclosed he’d signed a letter of intent to acquire an undisclosed seller on a conference call with analysts in October. 

While that transaction has come to light, Allison made it clear Home remains open to additional deals throughout its footprint. Indeed, when an analyst asked if the company might agree to another merger before the targeted first-half-2026 closing date for the Mountain Commerce purchase, Allison answered with a single word: Yes.  

“We’ve got a war chest of capital,” Allison added.  

Home had spent nearly four years on the M&A sidelines following its acquisition of the $6.8 billion-asset Happy State Bank in Amarillo, Texas, in April 2022. That deal had all the appearances of a triumph. Home touted it as triple-accretive, boosting earnings per share, book value per share and tangible book value per share. Strategically, acquiring Happy gave Home a foothold in Texas’ massive banking marketplace.

The celebration proved short-lived as a group of employees left for a neighboring institution, taking a large group of clients with them. Home claimed they took confidential information and used it to lure away clients and other employees. The incident triggered a long-running legal battle that ended in October with the former Happy employees agreeing to pay an undisclosed sum to Home. 

Allison has referred to the Happy transaction as a “fiasco,” but he appears to have put the experience behind him. On the conference call with analysts in October, Allison described himself as a “pretty happy camper.” Home’s profits for the first nine months of 2025 are up 19% from the same period last year – and Allison is back in a characteristic position: on the hunt for a bank (or banks) to buy. — John Reosti

Sam Altman

CEO, OpenAI 

In the three years since OpenAI launched ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence has redefined the way people discover and consume information on the Internet; shaken up long-running pedagogical practices at schools and universities; and set off an efficiency arms race among payments companies, banks and fintechs, each vying to see who can be first to market with new tools. 

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has in the closing months of 2025 set his sights on the banking industry, reportedly hiring hundreds of former employees from some of the country’s largest banks, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorganChase and Morgan Stanley, according to Bloomberg. 

Codenamed Mercury, the project has ex-bankers writing prompts and financial models for a number of different transaction types – including public offerings and restructurings – with the goal of replacing entry-level investment banking analysts’ tasks. That’s a steep evolution from current use cases being deployed by banks that largely focus on back-office operations. 

Altman has already warned bankers earlier this year that gen AI tools put the industry’s anti-fraud prevention measures at risk due to the ease at which AI can impersonate people. — Joey Pizzolato

Brian Armstrong

CEO, Coinbase 

Like many banks and crypto firms these days, Coinbase aims to be a bridge between the crypto economy and traditional financial systems. 

It has at least two major advantages. One is scale. Coinbase is the largest U.S. cryptocurrency exchange, and the biggest custodian of bitcoin. It has about 100 million users worldwide.  

Another is its ability to partner with mainstream financial institutions.

In July, Coinbase and JPMorganChase announced a partnership “to make crypto buying easier than ever,” according to the bank’s announcement. Using the bank’s API, Chase customers will be able to fund their Coinbase accounts using Chase credit cards. In 2026, they’ll be able to link their bank accounts to Coinbase wallets and transfer Chase Ultimate Rewards points to their Coinbase account. 

Coinbase is working with PNC to let the bank’s clients access crypto trading and custody via Coinbase’s “crypto-as-a-service” platform. 

In late October 2025, Coinbase struck a partnership with Citi through which the two companies will build stablecoin payment capabilities for the bank’s institutional clients, to enable easier transfers between fiat and crypto.

Coinbase’s leadership has said the firm offers its crypto-as-a-service infrastructure to 250 financial institutions worldwide.

The company hopes to one day be able to trade anything on its exchange, including loans, stocks and real estate.

“Coinbase is becoming the everything exchange,” Armstrong wrote on X in July. “All assets will inevitably move on-chain, so we want to have everything you want to trade in one place.” Another prediction he made this year: Crypto will one day be part of “everyone’s 401(k).” —Penny Crosman

Scott Bessent

Treasury Secretary

Some Treasury secretaries prefer not to take an active role in banking regulation. Scott Bessent likes to get involved.

Since taking office in January, Bessent has been uncommonly vocal about the need for reform in banking regulation and equally unusual in his assumption of a leading role in crafting that reform. In a speech to the American Bankers Association in April, Bessent laid out a deregulatory agenda that has largely been born out through actions and positions of traditionally independent regulators, including reducing anti-money-laundering compliance burdens for community banks, reducing the role of reputational risk in supervisory exams and issuing definitions of “unsafe and unsound” banking practices.

But while Bessent clearly holds sway with the banking agencies and has the confidence of President Trump, he has also staked out a handful of positions that are at odds with other elements of the administration. His support for Community Financial Development Institutions, for example, has been consistent and robust throughout his tenure, even as the president issued an executive order demanding the programs be reduced as much as legally possible and the Office of Management and Budget, led by Director Russell Vought, has blocked disbursement of CDFI-allocated funds.— John Heltman

Michelle Bowman

Vice Chair for Supervision, Federal Reserve

Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle “Miki” Bowman has ushered in a deregulatory shift at the central bank since taking on the role in mid-June.

Bowman, a former community banker and Kansas state banking commissioner, has vowed to undo what she describes as burdensome supervisory practices and outdated regulatory requirements for banks — and she appears to be following through.

Most recently, the Fed’s Division of Supervision and Regulation announced notable changes in how banks will be examined, including a move away from emphasizing administrative and procedural shortcomings.

“This is not about what we are leaving behind — it is about building a more effective supervisory framework that truly promotes safety and soundness across our financial system, which is the Federal Reserve’s core supervisory responsibility,” Bowman said.

Bowman has also outlined her regulatory priorities for banks in the near-term, including potential modifications to several oversight tools such as stress testing, the supplementary leverage ratio and the Basel III framework. Many of these changes are expected to be unveiled in 2026. — Maria Volkova

Alex Chriss

CEO, PayPal

PayPal’s CEO is leaning heavily on agentic AI to support an “omnichannel” payment strategy, making Venmo and PayPal interoperable for the first time and expanding its digital wallet to new markets. 

Recent moves include the launch of Agentic Commerce Services, which features payment support; order management and connections between merchants and product data; fulfillment and AI-powered checkout. Another initiative, PayPal World, is designed to advance the company’s new strategy under Chriss, who is using a mix of partners and collaboration to boost its expanding portfolio of artificial intelligence-powered payment applications. The strategy is an effort to increase branded checkout and international payments, two areas that are driving its growth strategy for the near future, and a key metric that investors are looking at to gauge the company’s fiscal health and how it’s stacking up against rivals like Block and Stripe. 

“We’re looking for interoperability on a global basis,” Chriss told American Banker. “Whether it’s agentic commerce or crypto or mobile wallets.” –John Adams 

Patrick and John Collison

CEO and President, Stripe

John (pictured above) and Patrick Collison have been a thorn in the side of banks and payment companies for years, using easily accessible technology for small businesses to build one of the world’s largest technology startups. The brothers are now turning their attention to emerging forms of artificial intelligence and digital assets. Stripe and OpenAI recently launched Instant Checkout in ChatGPT. ChatGPT users are able to make purchases from U.S.-based Etsy sellers with an integration with Shopify, making the ChatGPT “buy button” available for about 1 million merchants. Stripe and OpenAI also released a standard for agentic AI-powered transactions; and Open Issuance, which enables businesses to launch and manage their own stablecoins. Stripe has also upped its stablecoin game through a series of partnerships with cryptocurrency firms and fintechs. 

This puts Stripe in the middle of an AI-payments and blockchain boom as dozens of banks and technology companies consider issuing stablecoins, while payment companies build agentic AI protocols.

Investors are buying into the company that the Collison brothers founded in 2010. Stripe’s valuation passed $90 billion during the past year, as processing volume reached $1.4 trillion and the company reported a profit. It’s a big comeback for the firm that had seen its valuation fall from more than $95 billion to about $65 billion during the fintech slump that followed the pandemic. “Commerce is about to change fundamentally and we’re talking every day about what it will take to adopt agentic commerce,” Emily Sands, head of data and AI at Stripe, told American Banker in an earlier interview. — John Adams  

Bill Demchak

CEO, PNC 

Demchak has long been one of the loudest advocates for scale among bank leaders, and this year his $569 billion-asset bank made moves to get bigger.

The longtime executive of the Pittsburgh-based PNC has been known in the industry to speak his mind about the regulatory environment, technology and the economy. Throughout 2025, he’s made comments about the Trump administration’s helpful shifts to supervision and enforcement of banks.

As PNC steadily plants more branches across markets in the South and Southeast, the bank will also get a beachhead in the West. Earlier this year, PNC said it would acquire FirstBank Holding Company in Colorado, which will rapidly increase its deposit presence in the Denver and Phoenix areas. 

But Demchak said most of the bigger financial institutions aren’t for sale, even as regional banks search for ways to keep up. Earlier this year, PNC brought on BlackRock executive Mark Wiedman as president, and the most-likely candidate to be Demchak’s eventual successor.

Going forward, the bank, which prides itself on being “boring,” will keep chasing growth, but not necessarily through M&A. — Catherine Leffert

Jamie Dimon

CEO, JPMorganChase

The leader of America’s largest bank often makes waves in the industry by lambasting capital regulations, opining on financial markets and reeling in record profits for his company.

People listen to Dimon, whether he’s speaking about his bank’s “fortress balance sheet,” a term he popularized, or warning about geopolitical risks and the importance of the U.S. as an economic superpower.

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump said he had watched a Fox Business interview with Dimon, in which the CEO said a recession was “a likely outcome” of the tariffs announced at that time. 

Although Dimon and Trump have had their disagreements, the two have reportedly met at least twice this year to discuss issues like the economy and financial regulation. The Trump administration has made moves to roll back a number of regulations that have ticked off Dimon over the years, such as capital requirements.

Though it’s still not exactly clear how much longer Dimon will head the $4 trillion-asset bank, which he’s done for nearly two decades, he said this summer that retirement is still “several years away.”—Catherine Leffert

Richard Fairbank

CEO, Capital One

The ultimate verdict on Capital One Financial’s $51 billion purchase of Discover Financial Services won’t come for several years.

That’s because the acquisition is largely a bet on Capital One’s ability to build Discover’s undersized payments network into one that rivals Visa, Mastercard and American Express — and it will take substantial time, if it happens at all, to persuade overseas merchants to accept Discover network transactions.

Still, 2026 is shaping up as a key year for Capital One and Richard Fairbank, its co-founder and longtime CEO. 

Shares in the credit card giant are up about 40% since the Discover acquisition received regulatory approval in April — and up roughly 70% since the deal was announced in February 2024. 

But even garden-variety integrations can be tricky, and the Capital One-Discover integration is anything but normal.

In July, Capital One announced that the costs of the integration would exceed its original $2.8 billion guidance, but didn’t say by how much. Then in October, the McLean, Virginia-based company projected a short term “brown out” in loan growth, saying it was working to trim Discover’s portfolio, particularly of borrowers with high balances and lower credit scores.

So far, investors seem excited by Fairbank’s promise that the Discover acquisition gives Capital One the chance to “build something really special.” But if there are hiccups in 2026, their patience could be tested. —Kevin Wack

Jane Fraser

Chair and CEO, Citi

Jane Fraser, the Most Powerful Woman in Banking, continues to leave her imprint on Citi.

The $2.6 trillion-asset megabank, which suffered through years of financial underperformance, risk management system blunders and a stagnant stock price, has been in overhaul mode ever since longtime exec Fraser became CEO in March 2021. This fall, Fraser pointed to Citi’s “consistently strong results,” including record third-quarter revenue for all lines of business and improved returns, saying such results demonstrate how Citi is a fundamentally different company these days.

The changes include selling or winding down underperforming overseas consumer operations, retooling the business model to establish five core businesses and cutting management layers.

“The cumulative effect of what we have done over the past year — our transformation, our refresh strategy, our simplification — [has] put Citi in a materially different place in terms of our ability to compete,” Fraser told analysts during the bank’s third-quarter earnings call.

Heading into 2026, Fraser is laser focused on achieving a key profitability metric — a return on tangible common equity of 10%-11% for the full year. If Citi can pull it off, and continue to see upside in its stock price, Fraser will cement her place as one of Citi’s great changemakers.

Fraser’s influence over Citi’s present and future ambitions expanded this fall when she was appointed chair of Citi’s board of directors. The same week, she was appointed co-chair of the U.S.-Saudi Business Council board of directors, a role that requires her to “provide strategic direction and leadership to advance the council’s mission as the organizational hub and champion of bilateral business between the United States and Saudi Arabia.” 

In addition, Fraser is serving a two-year term as chair of the Financial Services Forum, a trade organization whose members are the CEOs of the eight largest financial institutions in the country. She remains the only woman running a Wall Street bank, and one of only two running a top-50 U.S. bank by assets. —Allissa Kline

Vik Ghei and Misha Zaitzeff

Co-founders, HoldCo Asset Management

In the notoriously opaque world of banking, investors who speak out against banks’ practices get noticed. Vik Ghei and Misha Zaitzeff, who run HoldCo in South Florida, have been some of the most outspoken activist investors of the industry in recent history.

HoldCo has released reports this year calling out five different companies — Comerica, Columbia Banking System, Eastern Bankshares, First Interstate BancSystem and KeyCorp. A few weeks after the hedge fund pressed Comerica to sell, the bank announced a deal with Fifth Third Bancorp. Shortly after HoldCo lambasted Columbia and demanded additional buybacks, the bank approved a major share repurchase plan.

Most recently, HoldCo told the $187 billion-asset Key that it should fire CEO Chris Gorman.

HoldCo has spoken against M&A and in favor of stock buybacks, and highlighted what it sees as overpaid executives. In November, the firm sued Comerica over what it called a “flawed” merger process with Fifth Third.

As HoldCo continues to drop massive, scathing reports, other investors, analysts and seemingly the banks themselves are listening.—Catherine Leffert

Jonathan Gould

Comptroller of the Currency

Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould has made clear he aims to aggressively restart bank formation, encourage fintech and crypto to mingle with banks, focus on the most obvious risks at national banks and combat debanking in a recent interview with American Banker. 

Perhaps most importantly, Gould will lead some of the first major stablecoin rulemaking under the GENIUS Act. The result could be a bigger and transformed financial system where fintechs with less supervisory oversight compete for deposits with banks directly. Gould has said bringing fintechs and crypto firms into the national trust system reduces regulatory arbitrage, but banks disagree. In December, the OCC granted five national trust charters to crypto firms, and another half-dozen hope to see their applications approved in 2026. — Ebrima Sanneh

Michael Hagedorn

President, Erebor Bank

Michael Hagedorn is building a digital-first de novo bank, Erebor, to serve technology, virtual currency, manufacturing and defense companies and their high-net-worth entrepreneur owners. Alongside traditional loans and deposits, Columbus, Ohio-based Erebor will also mint and burn stablecoins and let customers borrow against their virtual currency holdings. 

“The mission of Erebor is to effectively bank those leading frontier companies that are in technology, AI, fintech, manufacturing,” Hagedorn, who worked for decades as a chief financial officer at Valley Bank, UMB Bank and Wells Fargo, told American Banker.

Erebor Bank was the brainchild of Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, designer of the Oculus Rift virtual reality headset and founder of military contractor Anduril Industries. It’s backed by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Katie Haun’s Haun Ventures and Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC.

“I founded it because I wanted something like Erebor to exist for the sake of my love for all of these other technologies … a safe, reliable banking partner for people like me who care about tech for the sake of tech,”  Luckey said during a recent TBPN podcast.

Erebor’s leaders have received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency for a national bank charter that they’re hoping will be finalized sometime in 2026. 

The bank will operate 24/7, 365 days a year and have no branches. Its Newport Beach-based engineers are building a new core system, though the bank will use vendors for its general ledger and compliance with the Bank Secrecy Act, anti-money-laundering rules and sanctions screening rules. 

“It’s a complete rethinking, from basically a blank piece of paper, what would you do for a bank in 2026,” Hagedorn said. 

In the early days of development, the software programmers repeatedly asked Hagedorn how different financial things work. 

“I would tell them, and then I learned very quickly to add, but don’t do that – don’t just rebuild what is already out there that’s not as efficient, not as quick,” Hagedorn said. “Think about how you can do it faster, better, cheaper, more efficiently. So I can bring the experience I have after almost 40 years in the business, but also have the humility to say, let’s not rebuild what everybody else has done, because we’re not trying to be like everybody else.” — Penny Crosman

French Hill

Congressman, R-Arkansas

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Rep. French Hill, R-Ark., is one of Congress’ leading banking lawmakers. A former community banker himself, Hill has made items like Dodd-Frank rollback, de novo bank formation and other core banking issues a hallmark of his chairmanship.

Hill’s version of the stablecoin legislation didn’t get as much consideration by the Senate as many in the banking community expected, as the House passed the Senate version of the bill without major changes that benefited banks. Hill is expected, however, to wield more power over bank policy in Congress, where he already holds a lot of soft power as a subject matter expert on financial issues, moving forward, as the White House exerts less pressure over both market structure and deposit insurance debates. — Claire Williams

Travis Hill

Acting Chair, FDIC

Since becoming acting chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. in January 2025, Travis Hill has finalized or previewed a series of regulatory rollbacks, promising to simplify regulation and encourage more financial risk-tolerance. 

In 2026, Hill — who is set to be confirmed for the permanent role — will preside over a pared-back agency that will not examine banks for reputational risk, limiting enforcement actions and “matters requiring attention” to only the most obvious risks while lowering capital requirements for megabanks in an environment where banks have more freedom to engage in fintech or crypto-related services. Hill says he will issue some of the first regulations in response to the GENIUS Act by year-end.

The new year should mark a continuation of lighter-touch supervision, particularly Hill’s preference for simpler, less process-driven oversight and a narrower, more risk-focused regulatory approach that encourages business activity like mergers and new bank formation. — Ebrima Sanneh

Max Levchin

Founder and CEO, Affirm 

Affirm founder and CEO Max Levchin has built a career disrupting payments. Ten years after co-founding PayPal, Levchin founded Affirm, a point-of-sale financing company that is now seen as one of the bellwethers of a $500 billion industry. 

Affirm has proven that buy now/pay later companies can be profitable amid surging consumer and merchant demand, and has popularized subvented financing for everyday purchases. Even investors and private credit have warmed up to BNPL’s short duration and strong repayment trends. 

Levchin is looking forward to the future where AI agents optimize consumers’ finances, and the windfall that will bring them — and Affirm, he previously told American Banker. But until then, expect to see more distribution deals for Affirm and more buyers for its increasing portfolio of loans. — Joey Pizzolato

Ryan McInerney

CEO, Visa 

There’s a sea of change happening in the payments industry. Stablecoins are finding their footing, e-commerce is on the cusp of an agentic AI revolution, and the long-awaited open banking framework passed in October 2024 is already being reevaluated.

As one of the largest payments companies in the world with unprecedented scale, Visa has been looking for ways to maintain its position of power as payments move beyond traditional card rails. CEO Ryan McInerney in the year ahead will be tasked with deploying Visa’s answer to the industry’s top questions. 

Visa is experimenting with deploying stablecoins on its real-time payments rail, Visa Direct, and is hard at work developing its own tokenized agentic protocol that will eventually allow chat bots to make purchases on behalf of consumers. —Joey Pizzolato

Jonathan McKernan

Under Secretary of Domestic Finance, U.S. Treasury

Jonathan McKernan serves as a key advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant on financial regulatory issues, advocating for reduced capital requirements for large banks and an increase in bank mergers. 

McKernan, who previously served on the board of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., was initially nominated to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But with that agency being dismantled, McKernan successfully maneuvered his way into a more critical role in the Trump administration.

He is helping Bessant undo the regulatory framework of the Biden era while selling the Trump administration’s policies to Wall Street. McKernan has advocated for regulators to develop more detailed guidance governing banks’ relationships with financial technology firms, suggesting that regulators scale back third-party risk guidance to foster competition with banks. — Kate Berry

Stephen Miran

Governor, Federal Reserve

Federal Reserve Governor Stephen Miran, who has been at the central bank since September 2025, has quickly made a mark with his views on how the Fed should conduct monetary policy.

Miran, who joined the bank while on leave from a White House appointment, has argued that short-term interest rates should be cut sharply, contending that monetary policy is far tighter than commonly believed. In multiple public appearances, he has said disinflation is emerging in housing services and will eventually shape the broader inflation outlook. He has pointed specifically to slowing rent growth and to border policies as factors influencing the housing sector. These assertions have drawn varying levels of skepticism from economists.

Miran’s economic outlook aligns closely with the views of President Donald Trump. The Fed governor was notably one of the chief architects of the president’s tariff regime. His term on the Fed board officially ends Jan. 31, 2026. — Maria Volkova

Brian Moynihan

CEO, Bank of America

It’s not easy to make a case for Brian Moynihan as a changemaker. The longtime Bank of America CEO is notoriously cautious, favoring a steady and workmanlike approach to leading the nation’s second-largest bank — in stark contrast to his headline-grabbing rival, Jamie Dimon of JPMorganChase.

But in recent months, Moynihan has shown some signs of evolving. In November, BofA held its first investor day since 2011, when Moynihan was just one year into his reign. Though the event made no earth-shattering announcements, a number of analysts welcomed the increased transparency.

And in another sign of openness to change, BofA announced in September what appears to be the beginning of a succession plan: Dean Athanasia, head of regional banking, and Jim DeMare, head of global markets, were promoted to co-presidents of the company. Meanwhile, Chief Financial Officer Alastair Borthwick was given the additional title of executive vice president. All three men are considered potential successors to Moynihan.

But the current CEO isn’t leaving any time soon — Moynihan said he plans to stay through at least the rest of this decade. And in these years of economic uncertainty, political upheaval and technological revolution, his steady hand may offer a model to other bank leaders. — Nathan Place

Jerome Powell

Chair, Federal Reserve

Abraham Lincoln once remarked that he sometimes felt like “the tiredest man on earth.” Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell could reasonably make the same claim.

Powell, who has served as a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors since 2012, was tapped by President Trump in his first term to lead the central bank, beating out former Fed Chair Janet Yellen purely based on party affiliation (Powell is a registered Republican). Trump quickly soured on Powell, however, when the central bank began making incremental increases to the federal funds rate in 2018. The President threatened to fire Powell in numerous interviews despite the legally murky and economically inadvisable basis for such a move.

With Trump’s reelection came a predictable resurgence in Trump’s animus toward Powell, with the president going so far as to accuse Powell of mismanaging renovations at the central bank’s headquarters and even staging a visit to the construction site to confront Powell on live television.

The departure of former Fed Gov. Adriana Kugler and confirmation of erstwhile White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran to the board — combined with the emergence of a purported scandal concerning fellow Fed Gov. Lisa Cook’s mortgage applications — has taken the heat off of Powell in recent months. That is also likely a reflection of Powell’s lame duck status, as his term as Fed chair expires in May 2026. 

But Powell is not out of cards to play. While his tenure as chair is nearly over, his term as a member of the board of governors does not expire until January 2028. Traditionally, Fed chairs resign their posts as Fed governors when their terms as chair expire, but it is not a rule that they must do so and such a move is not without precedent. Former Fed Chair Marriner Eccles’ term as Fed chair expired in 1948, but Eccles remained on the board until 1951 because of a dispute with President Truman about the central bank’s independence. 

Powell has repeatedly demurred when asked about his post-chairmanship plans. But should he choose to stay on the board, it would effectively stymie the White House from putting its own preferred candidate in his place until 2028, and offer Powell an opportunity to operate at the Fed without the burden of speaking for and being the face of the institution. But Powell is also a traditionalist in many respects, and could welcome an opportunity to hang up his purple tie and ride his bike off into the sunset. —John Heltman

Charlie Scharf

CEO, Wells Fargo

Six years after arriving at scandal-plagued Wells Fargo, Charlie Scharf has weathered the storm.

In 2025, a series of enforcement actions got lifted, capped by the removal of the Federal Reserve’s asset cap. The bank later named Scharf chairman of its board of directors, in addition to CEO, and awarded him a special equity grant of $30 million in restricted share rights, as well as more than a million stock options.

So more than ever, Wells Fargo is now Scharf’s company. It’s time to implement his vision.

What will the revamped megabank look like? Wells’ recent earnings reports have provided some clues, as have comments by the bank’s executives.

Wells has historically been a smaller player in the credit card business than JPMorganChase, Bank of America and Citi. But in the first nine months of 2025, Wells’ credit card revenue was up 8% from the same period the previous year.

“I think the credit card business is a huge opportunity for us to continue to grow,” Chief Financial Officer Mike Santomassimo said at a conference in September.

Investment banking is another area where Wells hopes to keep making strides. Its year-over-year income from investment banking fees was up 18% in the first nine months of 2025.

“In other businesses such as credit card, investment banking and markets, while we’re not top three yet, we have enough scale to compete with the top three, and have competitive advantages that we think support the ability to increase our share profitably,” Scharf said during Wells’ third-quarter earnings call.

Scharf was once a protégé to Jamie Dimon. By the end of 2026, it’s likely that Wells’ business mix will bear an even closer resemblance to JPMorgan’s than it did before Scharf became CEO. —Kevin Wack

Tim Scott

Senator, R-South Carolina

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., has already ushered stablecoin legislation through the Senate Banking Committee and, ultimately, to the desk of President Donald Trump.

Scott also plays an important role within the Republican party writ large. He’s chair of the Republican party’s Senate fundraising arm, a position that gives him outsize influence.

Scott’s views on financial services usually adhere strictly to that of the Trump administration, and change alongside it. Now that stablecoin legislation is law, the Senate Banking Committee under Scott’s leadership is looking to address crypto market structure issues and deposit insurance reform. —Claire Williams

Donald Trump

President, United States of America

Whether the change is good or bad, Donald Trump is transforming the world of banking.

In his first year back in office, the 47th president has alternately delighted and destabilized the industry. His deregulatory policies, from gutting the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to jettisoning the “disparate impact” legal doctrine, have lightened banks’ compliance burdens and let some lenders off the hook for enforcement actions.

On the other hand, Trump’s sweeping tariffs caused such severe economic uncertainty that bank M&A activity froze for about a month. His crusade against the “debanking” of conservatives — coupled, paradoxically, with his vow to punish those who fund antifa — have vexed lenders struggling to stay out of the administration’s crosshairs. In November, JPMorganChase said it was facing multiple debanking-related investigations.

Meanwhile, the president has sporadically floated ideas that could upend the industry. He has pushed to end quarterly earnings reports, making them semiannual instead, and proposed the creation of a 50-year mortgage. Early in 2025, he commanded the U.S. Mint to stop making pennies — and by the end of the year it had complied, causing chaos for both retailers and their banks.

As Trump 2.0 enters its second year, further disruption seems likely. More debanking investigations may be launched, and more of the CFPB’s caseload may be dropped. Beyond that, the only thing banks can expect with confidence is the unexpected. — Nathan Place

Russell Vought

Acting Director, CFPB

Russell Vought has said many times that he expects the CFPB to be shuttered soon, though his efforts to make that shuttering a reality remain contested in court. 

For now, the CFPB’s union, the National Treasury Employees Union, has kept the agency alive through legal challenges. But Vought may deliver a final blow to the CFPB with his refusal to request funding for the agency through the Federal Reserve System. He is potentially setting up a second funding battle before the Supreme Court, which appears poised to give the president vast powers over independent agencies. 

In just 10 months, Vought has effectively neutered an agency created by Congress as part of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which was seen as one of the most visible innovations to emerge from the 2008 financial crisis. He has rolled back a slew of regulations finalized during the Biden era, stopped oversight of nonbanks, and eliminated all enforcement by transferring all pending litigation to the Department of Justice. Very little, if any, enforcement or supervision of financial institutions is happening under Vought, who serves dual roles in the Trump administration, where he is also the powerful director of the Office of Management and Budget. — Kate Berry