What bankers expect from bank M&A this year
Banks are expected to accelerate their offers to buy other banks as the industry consolidates under a favorable regulatory regime. In addition to widespread M&A among smaller banks, management consultants at Bain anticipate that an enlarged bank assembled through mergers will create a fifth institution with assets topping $1 trillion within four years.
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“By the end of 2030, we expect the ranks of this $1 trillion club to swell from four to between five and seven as large regional banks consolidate; in turn, that’s likely to fuel a reduction in large regionals, from 49 at the end of 2025 to between 30 and 40 in 2030,” wrote Bain partners Joe Lischwe, Dirk Vater, Joe Fielding and Phil Anselmino in a new report on bank mergers.
Read more of American Banker’s recent reporting on bank M&A and the state of the merger market:
The regional-bank merger wave that swept through the industry as the second Trump administration took office had a lot to do with regulators’ new propensity to approve deals quickly. That could encourage more deals over the next two years, in advance of the next presidential election.
“The limited window of opportunity is the risk that we get another kind of administration in 2029, and they go back to the kind of behavior we were seeing during the early Biden era,” Meg Tahyar, a partner and co-head of the financial institutions group at the law firm Davis Polk, told American Banker. At that time, large bank M&A deals were more closely scrutinized and took longer to be approved.
The window won’t “automatically slam shut, but it might get narrower” in 2029, Tahyar added.
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The year’s largest bank merger so far,
“We’re not going to do anything that’s premature or not appropriately planned out,” Riley told American Banker. “We can’t confuse our customers as to who can serve them until we can serve them across a single platform.”
Investment-banking income from helping other companies conduct mergers and acquisitions provided a strong boost last year for some of the largest banks, according to the Top Performing Banks ranking.
Matthew Prince, a business analyst at Capital Performance Group, said that 2025 was also a favorable year for mergers and acquisitions, which helped boost noninterest income at banks such as JPMorganChase and Morgan Stanley.
“I guess the regulatory environment right now, it’s more conducive to mergers and acquisitions, which helps bring in noninterest income through M&A, and that’s been elevated recently,” he said.
The secret to growth in 2025 for banks with between $10 billion and $100 billion of assets: M&A. Banks in that asset tier grew core deposits 8%, faster than the sector overall, mainly because of mergers.
“If we connect the dots here, there’s a segment of banks within the mid-size regional bracket here who really were dependent on M&A to grow deposits,” said Adam Mustafa, president of the banking data and advisory firm Invictus Group. “Because if they didn’t do M&A, their deposits would have grown at a slower rate than the market.”
Two years ago, the largest bank mergers and acquisitions by value took, on average, more than a year to close, much longer than smaller deals. In a sharp reversal, the biggest deals are now taking the fewest days to be finalized, according to a research report from Brean Capital.
The shift reflects a favorable regulatory environment under the second Trump administration, which has
“The regulatory environment has become friendlier under the new administration,” Brean Capital analyst Brian Martin told American Banker. The largest deals are now “clearly mirroring the smaller deals,” he added.
