The most memorable bank CEO quotes of 2025

Bank CEOs had a lot to talk about in 2025. Some of them were more blunt than others in addressing the hot-button issues of the day and measuring their own company’s performance.

Processing Content

As banking reporters we appreciate the candid and honest comments, which often add a dose of personality to stories that can be heavy with numbers, metrics and industry jargon. The best quotes usually come from quarterly earnings calls and industry conferences, where bank CEOs have an opportunity to speak their minds and assess the landscape as they understand it.

Consider the word “cockroach,” which gained an impressive amount of traction this year when JPMorganChase CEO Jamie Dimon likened the insects to potentially broad credit-quality issues.

In no particular order, here’s a look at some of the most memorable bank CEO quotes of the past year.

Jamie Dimon

CEO, JPMorgan Chase

Dimon is hardly a stranger to speaking his mind. As chairman and CEO of the largest bank in the U.S. based on asset size, he uses his platform to talk about all sorts of issues, such as remote work, industry regulations and the state of the national and global economies.

So it wasn’t a surprise when he spoke up about potential cracks in credit quality after a handful of banks reported credit hits this fall in connection with Tricolor Holdings, the Dallas-based subprime auto lender that was accused of fraud and filed for bankruptcy. JPMorgan was one of nine banks and alternative financiers caught up in the alleged multiyear scheme. In October, it disclosed that it had taken a $170 million writedown in connection with loans it made to Tricolor.

During JPMorgan’s third-quarter earnings call, Dimon warned of a larger credit problem.

“My antenna goes up when things like that happen,” he told analysts on the call. “And I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.”

John “Johnny” Allison

CEO, Home Bancshares

John “Johnny” Allison, CEO of Home Bancshares in Arkansas, is one of the most reliably outspoken bank leaders around. In 2024, he publicly endorsed Donald Trump during Home’s quarterly earnings call. Bank CEOs normally shy away from politics.

This year, Allison was remarkably candid about his company’s mergers-and-acquisitions plans when he told investors that Home had signed a letter of intent to buy a smaller bank. Bank CEOs usually keep such information close to the vest until an agreement has been reached.

A few weeks later at an industry conference, he had an especially pointed warning for banks whose M&A deals have diminished shareholder value. He said banks whose stock prices have been stagnant for the past decade, even as they’ve grown, may be in line for a reckoning with shareholders.

“These lost-decade banks, I think they’re going to get a hot shot in the butt, you know, I think somebody’s fixed to come after them and do something and I think they need it,” Allison said.

Jane Fraser

CEO, Citi

Jane Fraser, the CEO of Citi for nearly five years, has always had a refreshingly honest style when it comes to talking about the bank’s failed past performance and the need to do better.

Even as Citi claws its way back from dismal metrics and a lagging share price, Fraser has kept the heat on, arguing that there’s more to do. During the bank’s third-quarter earnings call, she expressed a confident tone about the bank’s future, but she wasn’t ready to hang up her hat.

The $2.6 trillion-asset bank is still addressing a pair of 2020 consent orders related to its history of risk management and internal controls failures. It’s still trying to achieve a key performance metric: a return on tangible common equity of 10-11% by next year, which would put it closer in line with its peers. And its stock price, while improving, has more room to increase.

“There isn’t, I think, a single person in our firm that feels that we are declaring victory,” said Fraser, who was named board chair this year and received a hefty one-time bonus as a result of the board’s satisfaction with her performance as CEO. “We’ve still got a long way to go.”

Brian Moynihan

CEO, Bank of America

Brian Moynihan found himself in a strange place in January. The Bank of America CEO was part of a five-person panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos interviewing President Donald Trump via a live video-feed. In response to Moynihan’s question about how Trump would maintain economic growth amid inflation pressures, Trump surprised him by bringing up debanking.

“I hope you start opening your bank to conservatives, because many conservatives complain that the banks are not allowing them to do business within the bank, and that included a place called Bank of America,” the president said. “They don’t take conservative business.”

Moynihan didn’t respond to the president’s comments. But in February, during an event at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C., he said that BofA “banks everybody” and argued that banks need clear and consistent regulation about who they can and cannot take as clients.

“People always ask me, ‘Do you have different approaches for different administrations?’ And we say, ‘Well, long term, we’ve been around since Washington was president, so if we geared ourselves up for this president, and then that president, we’d have had to change 45 times whatever it is,'” Moynihan said during the event.

“What we’re trying to say is, give us a rational regulatory structure and have it stick to the ribs.”

Bill Demchak

CEO, PNC Financial Services Group

Speaking of bank regulations, Bill Demchak, the longtime CEO of PNC Financial Services Group in Pittsburgh, addressed a proposed rule from federal bank regulators that would have a substantial impact on financial institutions.

The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. have each proposed reforms that would alter how and why they issue “matters requiring attention,” or MRAs, which require banks to fix certain processes or issues that could lead to financial risk.

Demchak spoke about the potential impact during the bank’s third-quarter earnings call, saying that PNC’s board of directors spends about half of its time together on “non-strategic, ticky-tacky MRA-related regulatory” items.

The OCC and the FDIC have explicitly requested comments on whether they should adopt quantitative measurements for “material harm.” If the proposal is approved as it’s currently written, the rule would spark a significant decline in certain workflows, Demchak predicted.

“If it does nothing else, it will get rid of all the crazy ancillary work we do on minor MRAs,” he said.

Terry Turner

CEO, Pinnacle Financial Partners

In one of the year’s highest-profile M&A deals, Pinnacle Financial Partners and Synovus Financial agreed to join together in a so-called “merger of equals” that will create a Category IV-level regional bank with more than $100 billion of assets. Investors swiftly expressed their feelings. The share price of both companies plummeted following the announcement, and Pinnacle’s still hasn’t recovered nearly six months after the deal was made public.

Terry Turner, Pinnacle’s co-founder and CEO, and other executives have spent a lot of time trying to ease concerns about the transaction, in part by arguing that it won’t be a repeat of the 2019 merger between BB&T Corp. and SunTrust Banks, which joined together to create Truist Financial. That particular deal helped sour investors on mergers of equals, partly due to the length of time it took to achieve the anticipated cost savings and partly due to integration issues.

Still, Turner has continued to defend the tie-up with Synovus, which is expected to close on Jan. 1. In an interview with American Banker in July, he was undeterred about the decision.

The market’s reaction “is an unfortunate thing, but it doesn’t change our excitement for what the earnings case is, what the shareholder return case is,” Turner said. “When we combine these companies, we’re going to be the best at compounding revenue and earnings in the peer group.”

Todd Rosenberg Photography

Mariner Kemper

CEO, UMB Financial

Bank CEOs had to wrestle this year with the topic of tariffs, thanks to the Trump administration’s rollout of aggressive, wide-reaching tariffs that were intended to spur new trade agreements.

The back-and-forth about which country would face which tariffs was dizzying at times, and bank stocks, along with much of the rest of the market, took a tumble. Companies, including banks, were left hanging due to the injection of uncertainty that the threat of tariffs delivered.

In April, Trump put a 90-day pause on reciprocal country-specific tariffs, but as that period drew to a close, bankers including Mariner Kemper, CEO of UMB Financial in Kansas City, Missouri, wondered how things would shake out.

In an interview with American Banker, Kemper said: “My belief system is that this administration, while they talk seriously about how they’re going to lay down the law, I don’t believe that they want to go down as the White House that burned down the nation.”

Jamie Dimon

CEO, JPMorgan Chase

Dimon had another memorable comment in 2025.

Just days after competitor Wells Fargo broke free from an asset cap that limited its growth for seven years, he gave a shout-out to Wells’ executives for trudging through the ordeal.

And, in his usual Jamie-style, he made his feelings about the situation perfectly clear.

“Congratulations. I mean, boy, they went through a long, arduous road,” Dimon said at an industry conference. “I think it’s grossly unfair, by the way, for a million different reasons.”

The Federal Reserve had imposed a $1.95 billion-asset cap on Wells in 2018 following the bank’s fake-accounts scandal. Charlie Scharf, a one-time protege and two-decade-long colleague of Dimon’s at JPMorgan, was hired by Wells in 2019 to help clean up the bank.

“The punishment should fit the crime, not be something you don’t understand at all what the punishment is. So my hats off to them,” Dimon said. “They’re back. They’ve got great bones.”