Did these 25 people actually change banking in 2025?

At the end of each year, the editorial staff at American Banker predicts who will have the biggest impact on the banking industry in the year ahead. For 2025, we chose 25 bankers, regulators, politicians, and execs in fintech, big tech, and payments — plus one pop superstar — and explained why we thought they would make a difference, positive or negative. Below, we examine whether we were right or wrong in each case. 

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See who we chose this year: 26 people who will change banking in 2026. 

Michael Barr

Governor, Federal Reserve

Heading into 2025, it looked like Michael Barr — who had been sworn in as the Federal Reserve vice chair for supervision in 2022 — would be spending the year holding out against the encroaching policy priorities of the incoming Trump administration. But instead, Barr chose his own adventure.

In January, Barr announced that he would step down as vice chair for supervision, and tendered his resignation in February. Importantly, Barr resigned from his leadership position but not from the Federal Reserve Board itself. On its face, one might assume that resigning his position would reduce Barr’s influence in banking policy, but in stepping down without stepping away from the board he compelled the Trump administration to choose between leaving the vice chair for supervision role unfilled for a prolonged period or choosing a replacement from the existing board members.

The administration chose the latter, nominating Fed Gov. Michelle Bowman — who had been a vocal critic of many of Barr’s initiatives — as his replacement. Since then, Barr has had a freer hand to criticize the administration’s initiatives, as he did this fall when the central bank opted to publish its stress testing models as part of a proposed rulemaking. It remains unclear how long Barr will choose to remain on the board — his term does not expire until 2032 — but he has shown in 2025 that he knows how to play the cards he’s been dealt. — John Heltman

Mike Bell

Attorney, Honigman

Mike Bell predicted, correctly, that 2024 would see a record number of credit unions buying banks. That year, there were an unprecedented 22 deals involving this kind of acquisition. Bell’s similar prediction for 2025, however, hasn’t quite panned out; as of December, the number of bank acquisitions by credit unions has only reached the low teens.

Bell, an attorney at the Michigan law firm Honigman, has advised on dozens of M&A deals of this kind. The forces that motivate credit unions to buy banks — such as the need for greater scale, efficiency and digital capabilities — are all still there, he said. But in 2025, external factors — including uncertainty over tariffs and interest rates — caused a pause in dealmaking.

“We had certain political and economic upheavals that took everybody’s focus,” Bell said. “None of those things in themselves, I think, actually matter to the M&A marketplace … but they’re big enough things in our economy and world today that they are distractions.”

In the second half of the year, Bell noticed a thaw in that frozen activity. And looking ahead, he’s confident that 2026 will be the year 2025 should have been, with credit unions acquiring banks at record rates once again — assuming “an act of God or massive political distractions” don’t gum up the works. That may be a big assumption, but Bell is confident in the currents flowing beneath the storm.

“That activity will happen. It’s driven economically,” Bell said. “The question is when.” — Nathan Place

Michelle Bowman

Vice Chair for Supervision, Federal Reserve

Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman did not have that title when 2025 began, and her path to obtaining it was more straightforward than many expected. 

Bowman, who was first nominated to serve on the Fed board by President Trump in 2018, had initially been selected to serve as a board member with community bank or state bank supervisory experience — a requirement added to the Federal Reserve Act as part of the 2014 reauthorization of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. Over the course of the ensuing years, Bowman — who has a background in community banking and who served as the Kansas state banking regulator — has cultivated a vocal constituency among community bankers and the banking industry as a whole.

While it was plain to see in late 2024 that former Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Michael Barr would get little traction for his views in the Trump administration, it was unclear to what lengths the administration would go to replace him or how much resistance Barr would mount to being replaced. What had been feared to be a lengthy power struggle instead amounted to little; Barr resigned as top regulator in such a way as to make Bowman his almost inevitable successor. 

Bowman, for her part, has jumped into the role headfirst. She has undertaken a number of deregulatory initiatives with her counterparts at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, including adjustments to the supplemental leverage ratio and stress testing program. In 2026, Bowman is likely to usher in a revamped Basel III Endgame proposal and complete implementation of various aspects of the recently passed stablecoin bill. — John Heltman

Raymond Chun

CEO, TD
TD Bank Group spent 2025 cleaning up, after pleading guilty to historic compliance crimes in the U.S. the previous year. U.S. regulators hit the Canadian bank with an asset cap to its American operations and fined it $3.1 billion.

Raymond Chun, who became president and CEO of the bank in February, inherited the mess, and its cleanup. And the bank has largely kept out of the spotlight as it works to restructure its stateside business and beef up its anti-money-laundering controls.

Executives said in December that TD had completed the “majority” of its U.S. AML remediation, though compliance efforts will likely remain the focus through 2026 and 2027.

But Chun said on the company’s earnings call in December that, broadly, he sees momentum “in every single one of the businesses” at the bank. — Catherine Leffert

David Cody and Luke LaHaie

Co-CEOs, Newity

David Cody and Luke LaHaie have helped turn Northeast Bank in Portland, Maine, into an unlikely SBA-lending powerhouse. Propelled by its partnership with Newity, the Chicago-based fintech Cody and LaHaie lead as co-CEOs, the $4 billion-asset Northeast finished the SBA’s 2025 fiscal year, which started Sept. 30, 2024, as the nation’s most prolific 7(a) lender, originating a total of 7,800 loans. Three months into fiscal 2026, Northeast is once again vying for the top spot.   

The 7(a) program is SBA’s flagship, offering guarantees of up to $5 million on loans originated by banks and other eligible lenders. Newity serves as the 7(a) origination engine for Northeast. 

Northeast’s results validate LaHaie’s prediction last year that the two partners could originate 600 loans a month on a regular basis. SBA has grown into a significant profit center for Northeast. Interest income and gain-on-sale proceeds from 7(a) loans totaled $7.6 million in the three months ending Oct. 31, up 31% over the same period in 2024. — John Reosti

Jamie Dimon

CEO, JPMorganChase

Dimon has moved markets this year for banks, and the finance sector at large, as he’s done for most of the 20 years he’s been CEO of America’s largest bank.

This October, he warned of “cockroaches” that may emerge in the private credit sector after a few one-off events hit banks with losses in the fall. For the next two weeks, analysts and investors were scouring banks’ financials for any signs of such cracks.

In May, he said tariffs may inflict more pain than the markets were accounting for. Shortly after, President Donald Trump announced a pause on the trade policy plans.

In the last year, Dimon has also shifted the industry’s outlook by opining on crypto, work-from-home culture and artificial intelligence. But in 2025, while he has said he thinks the economy has remained resilient, Dimon once again cautioned that the strength of the U.S. was of the utmost importance.

“The success of JPMorganChase has always been predicated on the success of the United States of America and the health of the world, particularly the strength of free and democratic countries,” Dimon said. — Catherine Leffert

Richard Fairbank

CEO, Capital One Financial 

Fairbank’s big bet — that Capital One could win regulatory approval for the Discover acquisition — paid off in 2025.

Trump’s return to the White House led to a less restrictive approval process for bank mergers, and the Capital One-Discover deal was waved through in April 2025, less than three months after the change in presidential administrations.

The megadeal turned Capital One, which Fairbank cofounded in 1994, into the eighth-largest U.S. bank holding company. Fairbank’s next challenge will be to build Discover’s relatively undersized payments network into a viable competitor to Visa and Mastercard. — Kevin Wack

Umar Farooq and Max Neukirchen

Co-heads of payments, JPMorganChase 

JPMorganChase made a big step this year by moving JPMD, the bank’s deposit token, to a wider audience, adding it to a public blockchain and collaborating with partners such as Mastercard and Coinbase. 

While the bank has long used a private blockchain, its move to Base, a Coinbase-affiliated blockchain, has the potential to deliver digital assets to a far broader mix of payments and users — another major step toward bringing on-chain finance to the mainstream. The strategy is one of the first major moves under the leadership of Umar Farooq and Max Neukirchen, who became the bank’s co-heads of payments in 2024. 

“JPMorgan’s expanded use of JPMD confirms a reality the industry can no longer ignore: Stable-value digital assets are becoming the new clearing layer of global commerce,” Monica Eaton, founder and CEO of Chargebacks 911, told American Banker in an earlier interview. “This is not a crypto experiment. It is an efficiency strategy.” — John Adams 

Jane Fraser

CEO, Citi

Jane Fraser, CEO of Citi, entered 2025 on a positive note: Analysts, including some of Citi’s harshest critics, were viewing the bank in a positive light, predicting that its stock and earnings were positioned to increase throughout the year, barring an economic recession.

Fraser, the only woman running a Wall Street bank, and her team kept moving forward with the bank’s multiyear plan to make Citi a smaller, simpler bank. The bank’s stock price, which has long trailed other large banks, crossed the $100 per share threshold in September and has continued to move mostly upward since then.

In 2025, Fraser completed her first year as chair of the Financial Services Forum, a trade organization whose members are the CEOs of the eight largest financial institutions in the country. Citi’s board of directors appointed her board chair this fall, with former board chair John Dugan saying in a press release announcing the appointment that Fraser’s “very deliberate plan to make Citi a simpler and more focused bank has created meaningful shareholder value.” 

This fall, she was once again named American Banker’s Most Powerful Woman in Banking. —Allissa Kline

Tom Fraser

CEO, First Mutual Holding Company

For Tom Fraser, CEO of First Mutual Holding Co. in Lakewood, Ohio, 2025 was a year of quiet progress. 

The $3.2 billion-asset First Mutual’s Cincinnati-based bank subsidiary, Warsaw Federal Savings & Loan, raised nearly $5 million in capital during the year. That total included investments from the Mission Driven Bank Fund and the Wheeling, West Virginia-based Wesbanco. The infusions boosted Warsaw Federal’s core capital ratio to 12.83% on Sept. 30, up from 7.30% a year earlier. 

Wesbanco’s investment, announced in June, was part of a $5 million private placement. Such transactions are common for stock-traded banks, but they’re rare for depositor-owned mutual institutions like Warsaw Federal. Fraser and other mutual banking advocates hope the Warsaw Federal private placement can serve as a template benefiting other depositor-owned banks going forward.  —John Reosti

Travis Hill

Chair, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Newly minted Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chair Travis Hill may be the most recent regulator to be confirmed by the Senate, but he’s been on the job longer than any other.

When former FDIC Chair Martin Gruenberg stepped down upon President Trump’s inauguration in January, Hill — then serving as FDIC vice chair — took the reins. That much was expected; as the top Republican on the FDIC board and former aide to Jelena McWilliams when she was the chair, Hill represented a known quantity to the administration and one they could leave in place while they focused on filling more critical vacancies.

Since assuming control, Hill has expressed priorities that are broadly in line with the administration’s, such as a more transparent approach to banks’ involvement with crypto assets and a softening of regulations to unlock economic growth. But whether that broad alignment would translate into a permanent placement was far from assured, not least when Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., briefly withheld his vote for Hill over concerns that efforts to reform the FDIC’s workplace culture have stalled. Kennedy later voted for Hill’s confirmation, saying he was satisfied that Hill takes reform seriously.

But with that nomination and confirmation now secure, Hill will wield considerable influence on forthcoming interagency rules, such as the forthcoming Basel III Endgame capital proposal, ongoing efforts to bring crypto into the regulatory perimeter and implementation of the recently passed stablecoin legislation. — John Heltman

Gunjan Kedia

CEO, U.S. Bancorp 

After nearly a year as U.S. Bancorp’s president, Kedia took over as CEO in April 2025, succeeding Andy Cecere.

Her first eight months on the job coincided with the enactment of the Genius Act and the subsequent embrace of digital assets by many banks, including U.S. Bancorp.

The Minneapolis-based company restarted bitcoin custody services following the demise of Biden-era regulatory guidance that had lessened the financial attractiveness of those services.

U.S. Bancorp was also named custodian of Anchorage Digital Bank’s stablecoin platform, and it has been testing its own stablecoin issuance on the Stellar network.

“If it creates value for the clients, you should lean into it, and not try to defend an old product or an old business model,” Kedia reportedly said at a conference in October. — Kevin Wack

Thomas Kurian

CEO, Google Cloud

Though perhaps modest, Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian made a mark on banks this year through a steady flow of cybersecurity threat intelligence out of Mandiant, a division of the cloud services provider.

No revelation matched the seismic impact some Mandiant reports (on SolarWinds, for example) have made in the past, but the company’s research remains vital to high-value targets such as banks.

This year, Google Cloud flagged a variety of groups, including one of North Korean IT workers infiltrating tech roles to conduct espionage and another group that used stolen credentials to breach data clouds at tech vendor Snowflake. — Carter Pape

Robert Lighthizer

Former U.S. Trade Representative

The U.S. trade representative during the first Trump administration did not land a formal role in the second one.

Lighthizer was a key architect of Trump’s tariff policies from 2017 to 2021, but he spent 2025 on the outside looking in. Meanwhile, the president selected Scott Bessent, a Wall Streeter who had voiced less skepticism about free trade than Lighthizer, as Treasury secretary.

Still, the 78-year-old Lighthizer has continued to have an undeniable influence on Trump’s trade policy. Jamieson Greer, a Lighthizer protégé, became U.S. trade representative in February. And Trump’s rapid-fire tariff threats, some of which he turned into policy, have helped reshape the country’s economic relationship with China and numerous other nations.

At the end of 2025, though, it remains unclear just how committed Trump is to Lighthizer’s vision of a revamped U.S. economy that’s much more reliant on domestic manufacturing. — Kevin Wack

Jonathan McKernan

Under Secretary for Domestic Finance, U.S. Treasury 

When Donald Trump was reelected in 2024, Jonathan McKernan — the erstwhile member of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. board of directors — was expected to have some kind of role in the administration’s financial regulatory apparatus, but what it would be was not immediately clear. The banking industry thought they had their answer when McKernan was nominated to be the next director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in February.

McKernan testified before the Senate Banking Committee for that position and had his nomination passed out of the committee on a party-line vote in March. But as his nomination was wending its way through Congress, acting CFPB Director Russell Vought had been working in earnest to legally terminate as many agency employees as he could. Though no reason was ultimately given, McKernan was abruptly nominated to serve as the Treasury under secretary for domestic finance and his nomination to lead the CFPB was later withdrawn.

Since settling into that role, McKernan has served as a top advisor to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and offered his views on a range of banking issues, most recently noting that the incoming rise of stablecoins could have profound implications for deposit-taking.—John Heltman

Brian Moynihan

CEO, Bank of America

Moynihan’s bank got back to growing its business in 2025, as lending has slowly started to pick back up, and the investment banking unit has delivered the company stronger earnings. The shifting regulatory environment also favored big banks, whose leaders have long spoken out against steeper capital requirements.

Politics also seemed to seep into Bank of America’s day-to-day more in the last year. Tariffs put pressure on the company’s business clients for a time, though Moynihan said he would take some trade policy hits if they came with some easing up of regulations.

President Donald Trump also called out Bank of America, and JPMorganChase, as offenders in the administration’s fight against so-called political debanking. Moynihan has said that many of the business decisions banks make are due to guidance from regulators.

Moynihan signaled he plans to stay in the top spot at the bank for at least another five years. The 66-year-old, who’s been CEO since 2010, said that an executive shuffle in September will help the bank “further build and deliver our capabilities across the globe,” but Moynihan will keep his role through the end of the decade. — Catherine Leffert

Satya Nadella

CEO, Microsoft
Under Satya Nadella’s leadership, Microsoft did not escape antitrust scrutiny from the Trump administration this year — a win for banks looking to rein in consolidation in the cloud services market. The FTC reportedly advanced a sprawling probe of the company’s cloud and AI licensing practices.

As for cybersecurity, China-based actors reportedly exploited a pair of zero-day vulnerabilities in the company’s software to deploy ransomware against roughly 100 of Microsoft’s customers over the summer. However, no banks publicly disclosed impacts — another win for banks, which rely on their vendors to support a strong cybersecurity posture. — Carter Pape

Joseph Otting

Chair, president and CEO, Flagstar Bank

Joseph Otting, the ex-comptroller of the currency who is now leading Flagstar Bank, entered 2025 with a massive challenge: pulling off a turnaround plan to save the struggling bank.

The job isn’t complete, but analysts say the Long Island-based Flagstar is now stable after nearly collapsing in the spring of 2024. The company is diversifying its loan portfolio to include more commercial-and-industrial loans and fewer multifamily and commercial real estate loans.

It’s been hiring more C&I bankers, improving its margins and controlling its expenses. As of the third quarter of this year, it still hadn’t returned to profitability, but its quarterly losses have grown smaller each quarter. As of early December, its share price was up more than 30% year to date.

This year, Otting undertook an internal restructuring that could inspire other regional banks to make similar moves. The bank sought and received permission to dissolve its holding company, a rare maneuver but one that Otting argued would cut costs and simplify its regulatory structure. 

“People might say, ‘Wow, here’s the former comptroller of the currency eliminating the holding company. That’s a big statement,'” he said. “How many other banks will take this approach?” —Allissa Kline

Jerome Powell

Chair, Federal Reserve

The chair for the Federal Reserve is typically — but not always — a powerful person in Washington. But while some Fed chairs have more sway than others, no one could say Fed Chair Jerome Powell has not been wielding influence on federal policy in 2025. 

Powell’s journey to the top of the U.S. central bank was unexpected but also a testament to Powell’s persistence. When he joined the Fed as a member of the board of governors in 2012, Powell was something of an afterthought; Powell, a Republican, was nominated by then-President Barack Obama alongside Democrat Jeremy Stein as a means of moving the nomination in a Republican-led Senate. Powell was reconfirmed for a second stint as board governor in 2014 alongside Democrats Lael Brainard and Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer.

But while all those other Fed governors have moved on, Powell has stayed in place, ultimately being selected as Fed chair by President Trump in his first term over then-Chair Janet Yellen largely from party pressure to fill the seat with a Republican. Powell was then renominated as chair by President Biden in 2022; his term as chair is set to expire in 2026.

But in the last full calendar year as chair, Powell has withstood considerable pressure from the White House to effectuate his departure — or, failing that, to lower near-term interest rates by a lot. Instead, he has maintained control over a Fed board that is growing increasingly divided about whether recession or resurgent inflation pose the greater threat to the economy.

Whether Powell stays on as a Fed governor after his term as chair expires in May or decides to resign, his example will likely wield influence even in his absence. President Trump’s protestations notwithstanding, Powell has cultivated an image as a politically neutral technocrat, and as such wields credibility in financial markets. For whomever President Trump chooses as the next Fed chair after Powell, that’s going to be a tough act to follow. — John Heltman

Charlie Scharf

CEO, Wells Fargo

Charlie Scharf told investors at the recent Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference that “the world is our oyster now.” 

His exuberance is understandable.

Scharf had one of the best years of any major bank CEO in 2025. In June, banking regulators lifted the asset cap that had constrained Wells Fargo’s growth for more than seven years. The following month, the San Francisco-based company’s board announced its intention to elevate Scharf to chairman and reward him with a $30 million special equity grant.

Looking forward, Wells Fargo appears to be entering 2026 with wind in its sales. Commenting Dec. 9 at the Goldman Sachs conference, Scharf hinted at the likelihood of a deposit spike, noting that the lifting of the $1.9 trillion deposit cap frees the company to pursue deposits it had previously been forced to cede to competitors. At the same time, Wells Fargo is targeting a new, higher profitability goal of 17% to 18% return on tangible common equity, a step up from the previous 15% goal. —John Reosti

Taylor Swift

Pop superstar; owner, Taylor Swift Productions 

For Taylor Swift and AI, it’s been no love story. And her experience foreshadowed that of many bankers.

In late 2024, Swift pushed back against artificial images of her purporting to endorse Donald Trump. “It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation,” she wrote on Instagram to her 283 million followers.

By the time American Banker conducted its Frictionless Fraud Survey in March and April of 2025, a third of the executive respondents had already experienced deepfake attacks. By July, even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was warning of a “fraud crisis” if banks still relied on voice biometrics and other now-easily spoofed protections.  — Daniel Wolfe

Donald J. Trump

President, United States of America

Certainly, presidents wield a great deal of power in any administration. But perhaps no single person has influenced the banking industry more in 2025 than President Trump has in the first year of his second term.

Trump’s biggest impact has been in replacing the Biden administration’s skeptical approach to integrating cryptocurrency into the broader financial system with a relatively unqualified embrace of digital assets. Trump signed an executive order in March to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve, and has promised to crack down on banks that unlawfully turned away crypto firms as customers. Congress passed a landmark stablecoin bill, known as the GENIUS Act, establishing rules and processes by which banks and nonbanks can issue stablecoins; the first implementing regulations for that bill are now beginning to emerge. 

Crypto firms have gotten the message, with a number of firms submitting applications to the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency to obtain national trust charters since the beginning of the year, with several having been granted. 

But while the Trump administration’s embrace of crypto has not always sat right with the banking industry, banks have found a lot to love from the administration’s approach to core banking issues like capital and supervision. Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman — who was appointed as the Fed’s top regulator earlier this year — has said reexamining banks’ regulatory capital framework with an eye to how individual capital requirements fit together is a top priority. Likewise, Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould has emphasized the need to refocus bank supervision on core safety and soundness matters. — John Heltman

Elizabeth Warren

U.S. Senator, Massachusetts 

Senator Elizabeth Warren’s influence over the banking industry this year has been limited by Republicans’ unified control over the government, but that hasn’t stopped her from banging the drum against the Trump administration’s deregulatory push. 

Central to that rollback is the attempted dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, Warren’s brainchild borne out of the 2009 financial crisis. Warren and other Democratic lawmakers have attempted to maintain Congress’ control over the CFPB’s future even in the face of overwhelming pressure by the executive branch, which has attempted to defund the bureau, gut it from the inside, and end existing regulations and consent orders.  

Warren has also been critical of Travis Hill, chairman of the FDIC, over his handling of toxic workplace culture at the agency; called for increased transparency and accountability at the Federal Reserve following the resignation of former governor Adriana Kugler; and questioned the motives behind President Trump’s pardon of former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao. — Joey Pizzolato

Kevin Warsh

Former governor, Federal Reserve

Former Federal Reserve Gov. Kevin Warsh, a confidant of President Trump, has been on the short list to serve as the next Fed chair for some time, but his moment has not yet arrived. 

Warsh, now serving as a visiting scholar at Stanford University, does not yet have a role in the Trump administration. He has, however, been floated as a potential replacement for Fed Chair Jerome Powell when his term expires in May 2026, alongside White House National Economic Council Chair Kevin Hassett and Fed Gov. Christopher Waller. 

President Trump reportedly considers Warsh the leading contender to serve as the next Fed chair, but until an official announcement is made ahead of Fed Gov. Stephen Miran’s departure in January, nothing is certain. — John Heltman

Xi Jinping

General Secretary, Chinese Communist Party

Under Xi Jinping’s leadership in 2025, state-affiliated threat actors in China used Anthropic’s AI coding assistant to automate a cyber espionage campaign that targeted tech firms, government agencies, chemical manufacturers and financial institutions, according to a November report from the company.

The cybersecurity community met the report with skepticism. A lack of specifics — IP addresses, file hashes, or domain names — made it impossible for external researchers to verify Anthropic’s claims or protect their own networks.

At a minimum, the report and China’s other cyber activity this year suggests it continues to innovate in its attacks against U.S. banks. — Carter Pape