The top echelons of wholesale banking might be as competitive as ever, but they are also more fragmented. Regulation and the cost of capital necessarily limit the scope of franchises in ways that the 1990s architects of one-stop shops could hardly envisage.
The biggest firms will still claim to have a more or less full-service offering, of course, but specializations persist – look at Morgan Stanley in equities, Citi in macro and rates, Bank of America Merrill Lynch in credit, Goldman Sachs in M&A and State Street in custody.
There is, however, one bank that can still lay better claim than most to the position of preeminent wholesale financial supermarket – JPMorgan, under CEO Jamie Dimon. On a trailing 12-month basis to the end of the third quarter 2018, the bank was biggest by revenues, profits, DCM revenues and fixed income revenues. And in any segment where it didn’t lead, it came close.
Viswas Raghavan, chief executive of JPMorgan in Europe, traces the bank’s success through the manner in which it is now able to compete at the very top of each vertical.