100 companies, 883 moves

The US "buy now, pay later" lender that PayPal co-founder Max Levchin started in 2012 to build an honest alternative to the credit card: fixed-term instalment loans at checkout with the total cost shown up front, simple interest, no late fees and no compounding. Affirm grew on the back of large-ticket merchants, above all Peloton, listed on Nasdaq in January 2021 at $49 a share, won Amazon and Sho

General Motors' captive finance company for nine decades (GMAC, 1919), sold to a Cerberus-led group in 2006, nearly destroyed by its mortgage arm ResCap in 2008 and rescued with $17.2bn of taxpayer money, then reborn as Ally — an all-digital bank funded by online savings deposits and lending mainly to car buyers through dealers. Treasury recovered $19.6bn by December 2014. After a decade of divers

The largest closed-loop card company in the world: an 1850 express-delivery firm that became a money-order and Travelers Cheque business, launched its charge card in 1958, and now issues cards, runs the network and signs the merchants on most of its own transactions. Its model is built on affluent, high-spending cardmembers who pay high annual fees and generate a merchant discount above Visa and M

The insurer founded by Cornelius Vander Starr in Shanghai in 1919, built by Maurice "Hank" Greenberg (CEO 1968–2005) into the world's most valuable insurance company, that lost its AAA rating in the 2005 accounting scandal, and then, in September 2008, nearly brought down the global financial system because a small London-based derivatives unit, AIG Financial Products, had written credit default s

The New York family office of Sung Kook "Bill" Hwang, a former Tiger Management analyst whose earlier hedge fund, Tiger Asia, had pleaded guilty to wire fraud in 2012, that used total return swaps with at least half a dozen prime brokers to build concentrated, highly leveraged positions in a handful of US and Chinese stocks, grew its capital from ~$1.5bn to more than $35bn in about a year (US indi

America's second-largest bank and its largest consumer deposit franchise. It is the product of a Charlotte roll-up machine (NCNB, then NationsBank) that took over the San Francisco bank A.P. Giannini founded to serve immigrants, then bought FleetBoston, MBNA, Countrywide and Merrill Lynch in five years. The crisis-era deals nearly broke it. Countrywide alone became the largest source of the tens o

A failing New England textile mill that Warren Buffett took over in 1965 and turned into the largest insurance-and-capital-allocation machine in American history. Insurance float, which cost less than nothing because its insurers mostly made underwriting profits, grew from ~$20m in 1967 to ~$176bn at the end of 2025. That float paid for stakes in Coca-Cola, American Express and Apple, and for whol

The New York broker-dealer that Bernard Madoff founded in 1960 with ~$5,000 and built into one of Wall Street's largest market makers, a pioneer of electronic trading and payment for order flow, whose founder served three one-year terms as chairman of Nasdaq, and which hid inside it the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Its investment-advisory business reported smooth returns of roughly 10–12% a ye

The world's largest crypto exchange by trading volume, founded in 2017 by Changpeng Zhao ("CZ") with a token sale that raised ~$15m, which grew faster than any exchange before it by listing tokens quickly, charging low fees and treating licensing and customer identification as obstacles rather than conditions. For years it served large numbers of American customers from offshore while presenting a

The world's largest asset manager. Larry Fink and seven partners founded it in 1988 as a bond-risk shop inside Blackstone, and it grew through three transforming acquisitions: Merrill Lynch Investment Managers (2006), Barclays Global Investors and its iShares ETF business (2009), and, in 2024–25, Global Infrastructure Partners, Preqin and HPS. It manages money for pension funds, insurers, sovereig

The company Jack Dorsey and Jim McKelvey founded in 2009 as Square, around a white plastic card reader that plugged into a phone's headphone jack and let anyone accept a credit card. It grew into two businesses that share a balance sheet but behave very differently: Square, a point-of-sale, payments and lending platform for small and mid-sized sellers, and Cash App, a consumer wallet with ~59m mon

The private financial data, news and technology company that Michael Bloomberg founded in 1981 with ~$10m from his Salomon Brothers partnership payout, built around a single product, the Bloomberg Terminal. Merrill Lynch was its first customer and, for 23 years, a minority owner; Bloomberg bought Merrill's 20% back in July 2008 for ~$4.4bn, leaving Michael Bloomberg in control with a reported ~88%

The oldest bank in the United States and the largest custodian in the world. It was founded by Alexander Hamilton and partners in 1784, and in 2007 it merged with Pittsburgh's Mellon Financial. Today it is a bank that almost no consumer uses directly but almost every financial institution depends on. It holds, counts, settles, lends and reports on ~$63tn of other people's assets (September 2026).

A San Francisco fintech founded in 2017 by two Brazilian founders, Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, that gave venture-backed start-ups a corporate charge card without a personal guarantee, underwritten on the company's cash balance rather than its founders' credit; grew into a "unicorn" within about 18 months and to a ~$12.3bn private valuation in January 2022; then in June 2022 told tens o

The Westport, Connecticut, macro investment firm that Ray Dalio started in 1975 from his two-bedroom Manhattan apartment as a research and risk-advice shop, that turned two ideas, the separation of "alpha" from "beta" (Pure Alpha, 1991) and balanced exposure to economic environments (All Weather, 1996, the original "risk parity" portfolio), into the largest hedge fund in the world by assets, that

The credit card company that two consultants, Richard Fairbank and Nigel Morris, built inside a Richmond, Virginia regional bank on the idea that a card is not a commodity but an information problem: test thousands of offers, price every segment for its own risk, and keep what works. Spun out of Signet Banking in 1994–95, Capital One became one of the largest US card issuers, bought branch banks (

The company that invented the modern listed options market. Founded in Chicago in April 1973 by members of the Chicago Board of Trade as the Chicago Board Options Exchange, it opened a month before the Black-Scholes pricing paper was published, created index options on the S&P 100 and S&P 500 in 1983, and in 1993 launched the VIX, the "fear gauge" that became both a household number and a trading

A crypto lender founded in 2017 by Alex Mashinsky and S. Daniel Leon that told retail customers to "unbank yourself," paid advertised yields of up to ~17–18% on deposited bitcoin, ether and stablecoins, grew to ~1.7m registered users and a reported ~$25bn of assets at its 2021 peak, and deployed customer coins into loans to trading firms, DeFi strategies, staking, bitcoin mining and purchases of i

The discount broker that Charles R. "Chuck" Schwab built after fixed brokerage commissions were abolished on May 1, 1975, and that became, through fifty years of price cuts, technology and acquisitions, the largest publicly traded US brokerage and the main custodian for independent investment advisers. It eliminated online stock commissions in October 2019, bought TD Ameritrade in 2020, and by Sep

The largest US consumer neobank, a San Francisco financial-technology company that is not itself a bank. It offers fee-free checking accounts, debit cards, a fee-free overdraft cushion (SpotMe), earned-wage advances (MyPay), a secured credit card and small loans to Americans who mostly earn under ~$75,000 a year. The deposits sit at two small partner banks, The Bancorp Bank and Stride Bank. Becaus

The world's largest publicly traded property and casualty insurer, built by a Bermuda excess-liability start-up, ACE Limited, that bought its way into US commercial insurance (CIGNA's P&C business, 1999), accident and health (Combined Insurance, 2008), Latin America and Asia, and then in January 2016 acquired the 133-year-old Chubb Corporation for ~$28.3bn and took its name. Run since 2004 by Evan

The Miami-based multi-strategy hedge fund that Ken Griffin founded in Chicago in 1990 with ~$4.6m, which nearly collapsed in 2008 when its flagship funds lost ~55% and it suspended redemptions, then rebuilt itself into the most profitable hedge-fund manager in history: by the end of 2025 it had made ~$90.4bn of net gains for investors since inception, more than any other manager (LCH Investments).

The Miami-based electronic market maker founded by Ken Griffin in 2002 as an options-trading offshoot of his hedge fund Citadel, which grew into the largest destination for American retail stock orders (it says it executes 35%+ of US-listed retail volume and roughly a quarter of all US equity volume), the biggest options market maker (~30% of US listed options volume), the largest designated marke

The most global of the big US banks, created in 1998 when Sandy Weill's Travelers Group merged with John Reed's Citicorp in a deal that broke the Glass-Steagall wall between banking, securities and insurance before the law was changed to allow it. Citigroup was the template for the "financial supermarket", then the largest bailout case of 2008 ($45bn of TARP capital and a loss-sharing guarantee on

The world's largest derivatives exchange group. It was formed by the merger of two Chicago rivals, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (the "Merc", 1898) and the Chicago Board of Trade (1848), and enlarged by the purchase of New York's NYMEX and COMEX in 2008. In 1972 the Merc invented financial futures, and it later built Globex, the first global electronic futures platform. It demutualised and liste

The largest US-regulated crypto exchange and custodian. Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam founded it in San Francisco in 2012 to make buying bitcoin as easy as using a bank app. It survived five crypto cycles by trying to be the "compliant" exchange: state money-transmitter licences, a New York BitLicense, and segregated custody. It co-created the USDC stablecoin with Circle in 2018, and that partne

A Chicago money-centre bank that ran a deliberate growth plan from the mid-1970s and by 1981 was the largest commercial and industrial lender in the United States and its seventh-largest bank. Illinois law limited it to a single office, so it funded that growth with large certificates of deposit, federal funds and Eurodollar money rather than retail deposits. It also bought about $1bn of speculati

The mortgage company Angelo Mozilo and David Loeb started in 1969 with two people and a small office, which grew into the largest home lender in the United States. It was a low-cost, high-volume machine that originated, sold and serviced loans through retail branches, brokers and correspondents. In the 2000s housing boom it chased market share into subprime, stated-income, piggyback and pay-option

The 167-year-old Zurich bank, founded in 1856 to finance Swiss railways, that bought its way into Wall Street through First Boston (1988–90) and Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette (2000), spent the 2010s paying billions to US authorities for tax evasion and mortgage-securities misconduct, lost ~$5.5bn in its New York prime-brokerage business when Archegos Capital defaulted in March 2021 (weeks after it

The credit card that Sears launched in 1985 to break into a market owned by Visa and Mastercard banks, which became the only large US card issuer that also owned its own payment network. Spun out of Morgan Stanley in 2007, Discover added the PULSE debit network (2005) and Diners Club International (2008), turned itself into a direct bank funded by online deposits, and earned some of the highest re

The St. Louis brokerage partnership that built America's largest network of financial advisers by putting one adviser in each small office, in small towns and suburbs that Wall Street ignored. Founded in 1922, it opened its first one-adviser branch in Mexico, Missouri in 1955, organised as a limited partnership in 1987 and is still owned by its employees: at the end of 2025 it had 516 general part

One of the three nationwide US consumer credit bureaus, an Atlanta company that began in 1899 as the Retail Credit Company and now sells credit files, income and employment verifications, fraud and identity tools and analytics to lenders, employers, governments and consumers. It is best known for two things: the September 2017 disclosure that hackers had taken the personal data of ~147 million Ame

Two shareholder-owned companies chartered by Congress that buy mortgages from lenders, guarantee them and sell them to investors as mortgage-backed securities. Together they stand behind roughly half of all US home loans and make the 30-year fixed-rate, prepayable mortgage possible. Fannie Mae was created in 1938 as a New Deal agency and turned private in 1968. Freddie Mac was created in 1970 and

The company behind the three-digit number that decides most American credit. Engineer Bill Fair and mathematician Earl Isaac founded Fair, Isaac and Company in 1956 to sell statistical decision tools; it built custom credit scorecards for lenders, launched a general-purpose credit score through the three credit bureaus in 1989, and became the mortgage market's standard when Fannie Mae and Freddie

The Boston fund company that Edward C. Johnson II founded in 1946 and his son Ned and granddaughter Abigail turned into the largest privately owned financial-services firm in the United States: the house of Peter Lynch's Magellan Fund, inventor of the check-writing money-market fund, the biggest 401(k) recordkeeper, a full-service brokerage, and the earliest major traditional firm to build crypto

The San Francisco private bank that won the coastal wealthy (doctors, lawyers, founders, families and the businesses they owned) with old-fashioned service, low-rate jumbo mortgages and a single point of contact, grew from a 1985 start-up to ~$213bn of assets at end-2022 without ever having a serious credit problem, and then failed on May 1, 2023 because its clients' deposits were mostly uninsured

One of the three companies, with Fiserv and Jack Henry, that run the back offices of most American banks. FIS processes deposits and loans, card authorisations, ATM networks, wires and treasury systems for thousands of banks, credit unions and capital-markets firms. It was built by acquisition: Systematics, the Little Rock core-banking pioneer of 1968; Certegy and eFunds; Metavante (2009); SunGard

The Milwaukee-born processor that runs the back offices of thousands of US banks and credit unions and, since its 2019 all-stock merger with First Data, one of the largest merchant acquirers in the world through the Clover point-of-sale platform. Built by more than three decades of acquisitions, it was for years a model of steady, double-digit earnings growth. That image broke on October 29, 2025,

A crypto derivatives exchange founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang, built on the back of their trading firm Alameda Research, that raised ~$2bn from blue-chip investors at a peak valuation of ~$32bn (January 2022), spent heavily on stadium names, a Super Bowl ad and political donations to become the "responsible" face of crypto in Washington, ran a separate US exchange (FTX US) and a

An Atlanta merchant acquirer that grew by acquisition from a 2001 spin-off of National Data Corporation's payments unit into one of the largest card-acceptance companies in the world. It bought Heartland Payment Systems (2016), whose 2008 data breach was one of the largest in payments history, and merged with card-issuing processor TSYS (2019). Then, in a three-way deal closed in January 2026, it

A London-based supply-chain finance firm founded in 2011 by Lex Greensill, a former Morgan Stanley and Citigroup banker from a Queensland farming family, that turned "reverse factoring" (paying a company's suppliers early in return for a discount) into a high-growth, technology-branded business; packaged its loans into notes sold mainly through ~$10bn of Credit Suisse funds; owned a small German b

The Greenwich, Connecticut broker built by Thomas Peterffy, a Hungarian-born programmer who bought a seat on the American Stock Exchange in 1977 and spent the next five decades replacing floor traders, back-office clerks and sales staff with software. Interactive Brokers began as Timber Hill, an options market maker that priced trades with computer models and handheld devices; it turned that techn

The Atlanta-based exchange and data group that Jeffrey Sprecher built from a $1 purchase of a struggling power-trading platform in 1997 into the owner of the New York Stock Exchange, the world's leading oil benchmark contract (ICE Brent), a large fixed-income data and index business, and the dominant software stack of the US mortgage industry. Founded in 2000 as an electronic over-the-counter ener

The company that made the US credit score free and turned the people who checked it into the most valuable audience in consumer-finance marketing. Kenneth Lin, Ryan Graciano and Nichole Mustard founded Credit Karma in San Francisco in 2007. It gave away TransUnion (and later Equifax) credit scores, reports and monitoring that rivals had sold for $15–30 a month. It made its money by recommending cr

The largest bank in the United States and the most valuable bank in the world. It was assembled from more than a thousand predecessor institutions, most importantly Chemical, Chase Manhattan, J.P. Morgan & Co. and Bank One. Since 2006 Jamie Dimon has run it on the doctrine of a "fortress balance sheet". That doctrine let it buy Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual in 2008 and First Republic in 2023,

The Stockholm-founded "buy now, pay later" company that turned pay-after-delivery invoices for Swedish web shops into a global payments brand, became Europe's most valuable private fintech at $45.6bn in 2021, was repriced to $6.7bn a year later, sold itself to investors as the poster child for AI-driven cost cutting, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in September 2025 at $40 a share (~$15b

The Jersey City market maker, founded in 1995 by Kenneth Pasternak and Walter Raquet, that became the largest wholesaler of US retail stock orders by paying brokers for their order flow, rode the 1990s online-trading boom to an IPO in 1998 and the top of the Nasdaq rankings in 1999, survived decimalisation, a founder's exit and a $79m customer-overcharging settlement, and then, on the morning of 1

A 158-year-old firm that began as a dry-goods and cotton business in Montgomery, Alabama, became one of Wall Street's great partnership banks, was sold to American Express in 1984 and spun off again in 1994, then under Dick Fuld grew into the fourth-largest US investment bank on a balance sheet of mortgages, commercial real estate and leveraged loans funded overnight. Its Chapter 11 filing on Sept

The New York insurtech, founded in 2015 by Daniel Schreiber and Shai Wininger, that set out to rebuild insurance around a phone app, chatbots ("AI Maya" for sales, "AI Jim" for claims), a flat fee and a behavioural-economics bet that customers who know unclaimed premiums go to charity will cheat less; that went public in July 2020 at $29 a share and more than doubled on day one, reached a market v

The company that made "peer-to-peer lending" a household phrase, then spent a decade proving that a lender without deposits is hostage to its loan buyers. Renaud Laplanche launched Lending Club in 2007 as a Facebook app matching borrowers with individual lenders; it registered its notes with the SEC in 2008, became the largest US marketplace lender, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in Dec

A conservative Southern California thrift, founded in 1925, that Charles H. Keating Jr.'s Phoenix homebuilder American Continental Corporation bought in 1984 for ~$51m and turned, within four years, into a ~$5.5bn vehicle for real-estate development, junk bonds and accounting-driven profits funded by federally insured deposits. When regulators in San Francisco moved to close in on it, five US sena

The Greenwich, Connecticut hedge fund founded in 1994 by John Meriwether, the former head of bond arbitrage at Salomon Brothers, with a partnership that included two future Nobel laureates (Myron Scholes and Robert Merton) and a former Federal Reserve vice chairman (David Mullins). It made ~40% a year after fees in 1995 and 1996 by betting, with very high leverage, that small price gaps between si

The company that made card issuing programmable. Founded in Oakland in 2010 by Jason Gardner, Marqeta built an open-API issuer-processing platform that lets fintechs and platforms launch their own debit, prepaid, credit and virtual cards, and it popularised "just-in-time" (JIT) funding, where a card holds no money until the moment of authorisation and the program decides in real time whether to ap

The second-largest global card network and the faster-growing of the two in services. It began in 1966 as the Interbank Card Association, a group of banks that wanted an alternative to Bank of America's BankAmericard, took the Master Charge name in 1969 and MasterCard in 1979, merged with Europay in 2002 and went public in May 2006 at $39 a share, two years before Visa. Like Visa it issues no card

For three decades the largest US "monoline" bond insurer, a company that rented its triple-A rating to cities, hospitals, toll roads and, increasingly, Wall Street securitisations, guaranteeing that bondholders would be paid if the issuer could not. Formed in 1973 as the Municipal Bond Insurance Association by a consortium of big insurers, it guaranteed several hundred billion dollars of debt at i

A San Francisco fintech, founded in 2017 by Immad Akhund, Jason Zhang and Max Tagher, that built the bank account most US start-ups now open first, without itself being a bank: deposits sat at partner banks (Evolve Bank & Trust and Choice Financial Group at launch, later Column N.A.), first through the middleware company Synapse and then directly. It took in ~$2bn of deposits and ~8,700 new custom

The New York life insurer founded in 1868 that grew rich selling "industrial" insurance door to door to factory workers, became America's largest life insurer as a policyholder-owned mutual, demutualised and listed on 7 April 2000, bought Citigroup's Travelers Life & Annuity (2005) and AIG's international life arm ALICO (2010) to become a global group, was designated a "systemically important" non

One of the two dominant US credit rating agencies and, increasingly, a data and analytics company. Moody's Corporation (NYSE: MCO), headquartered at 7 World Trade Center in New York, runs two businesses: Moody's Ratings (formerly Moody's Investors Service, MIS), which grades the creditworthiness of governments, companies and structured securities and is paid mainly by the issuers it rates; and Moo

The white-shoe investment bank created in 1935, when the Glass-Steagall Act forced J.P. Morgan's partners to choose between commercial and investment banking. It became a Wall Street trading powerhouse, nearly failed in September 2008, was saved by conversion into a bank holding company and a $9bn investment from Mitsubishi UFJ, and then spent fifteen years rebuilding itself around wealth and asse

The world's first electronic stock market, launched by the National Association of Securities Dealers on 8 February 1971 as a computer screen of dealer quotes, which became the listing home of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia and most of America's technology giants, and then turned itself into a software company. Nasdaq was spun out of its regulator in 2000, became a national securities exchange i

A Queens savings bank founded in 1859 that became, under CEO Joseph Ficalora, the largest lender on New York City rent-stabilised apartment buildings and one of the most acquisitive thrifts in America, then tried to turn itself into a national commercial bank in fifteen months by buying Michigan mortgage lender Flagstar Bancorp (December 2022) and the deposits of the failed Signature Bank (March 2

A Chicago bank founded in 1889 to look after the money of the city's richest families. It has become two businesses in one. The first is one of the world's leading wealth managers for the ultra-wealthy, with a Global Family Office business serving many of the largest US family fortunes. The second is a global custodian and fund administrator for pension funds, sovereign funds and asset managers, h

The original internet wallet. Born in 2000 from the merger of Peter Thiel and Max Levchin's Confinity with Elon Musk's X.com, PayPal became eBay's payment system, was bought by eBay in 2002 for ~$1.5bn, and was spun off in 2015 as one of the largest fintech companies in the world. It runs three businesses on one balance sheet: branded checkout (the PayPal button, high margin), Braintree's unbrande

The Newport Beach, California bond manager that Bill Gross, Jim Muzzy and Bill Podlich started in 1971 with ~$12m inside the insurer Pacific Mutual, and that grew into the largest active fixed-income firm in the world. Its Total Return Fund, run by Gross from 1987, became the largest mutual fund on earth (~$293bn at its April 2013 peak) and made Gross "the Bond King". Allianz, the German insurer,

The leading US consumer-permissioned financial-data network, a private San Francisco company that sits between apps and banks. When a person links a bank account to Venmo, Robinhood, Coinbase, Chime, a lender or a budgeting app, Plaid often makes the connection: it confirms the account, reads balances and transactions with the user's consent, and helps move money by ACH. Founded in 2012–13 by Zach

The Pittsburgh bank, formed in 1983 when Pittsburgh National merged with Philadelphia's Provident National, that turned itself from a Pennsylvania regional into a coast-to-coast "main street bank" through a series of well-timed acquisitions: National City at the bottom of the 2008 crisis, RBC Bank USA in 2012, BBVA USA in 2021, paid for partly by selling its 22% stake in BlackRock, and FirstBank o

The Newark, New Jersey insurer founded in 1875 to sell burial insurance to working families, whose Rock of Gibraltar became one of America's best-known corporate symbols; which paid well over $1bn for the Prudential-Bache limited-partnership frauds of the 1980s and billions more for life-insurance churning in the 1990s; demutualised and listed on 18 December 2001; built Japan's most profitable for

A New York fintech founded in March 2019 by Eric Glyman, Karim Atiyeh and Gene Lee, whose previous company, the price-tracking app Paribus, had been bought by Capital One in 2016; launched in February 2020 with a corporate card pitched not on rewards but on helping companies spend *less*; layered bill pay, procurement, travel, treasury and AI agents on top of interchange; rode the boom to an ~$8.1

The East Setauket, Long Island, quantitative trading firm founded by the mathematician and former code-breaker Jim Simons, whose Medallion fund, launched in 1988 and run since 2005 only for employees, has produced the most profitable trading record known (about 66% a year before fees and 39% after, 1988–2018, by Gregory Zuckerman's account), while the funds Renaissance sells to outside institution

The Menlo Park brokerage app, founded in 2013 by Stanford roommates Vlad Tenev and Baiju Bhatt, that launched commission-free stock trading on phones in 2015, paid for it by selling customer orders to wholesale market makers such as Citadel Securities (payment for order flow, or PFOF), and so forced the whole US brokerage industry to cut commissions to zero in October 2019. It then became the symb

The Detroit mortgage company that Dan Gilbert started in 1985 as Rock Financial, a suburban mortgage broker; sold to Intuit in 1999 and renamed Quicken Loans; bought back from Intuit in 2002; moved downtown into a struggling Detroit in 2010; turned the mortgage into a phone-and-web product with Rocket Mortgage (2015) and a Super Bowl advertisement that promised "Push Button, Get Mortgage"; became

Root, Inc. is a Columbus, Ohio auto insurer founded in 2015 by Alex Timm and Dan Manges on one idea: price car insurance mainly on how a person drives, measured by a smartphone during a short test drive, rather than on proxies such as credit score and education. Venture investors valued it at $3.65bn in 2019, and its October 2020 IPO at $27 a share raised ~$724m plus a $500m private placement, val

The largest US credit rating agency inside a broader financial-data company. S&P Global (NYSE: SPGI), headquartered at 55 Water Street in New York, owns S&P Global Ratings, the biggest of the "Big Three" agencies; S&P Dow Jones Indices, which calculates the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average and licenses them to trillions of dollars of index funds and futures (73% owned, with CME Group h

The New York commercial bank, founded in 2001 by a team of bankers who left Republic National Bank after its sale to HSBC, that grew without a consumer branch network (its ~40 offices, which the FDIC counted as branches, were mostly upstairs private-client suites) by hiring whole "private client groups" of relationship bankers, lent heavily on New York City multifamily and commercial property, and

The California commercial bank that made itself the house bank of the venture-capital economy (start-ups, their investors and their founders), grew from ~$62bn of deposits at end-2019 to ~$189bn at end-2021 as venture money flooded in, parked most of that cash in long-dated mortgage bonds at near-zero yields, and failed on March 10, 2023 after a ~$42bn one-day run by a tightly networked, ~94% unin

A small San Diego-area thrift that became the main US bank of the crypto industry, built the Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN) so that exchanges and trading firms could move dollars to each other around the clock, grew deposits from ~$2bn in 2019 to ~$14bn at end-2021 almost entirely from crypto companies, counted FTX and Alameda Research among its clients, lost ~$8.1bn of crypto deposits in the q

A lender started in 2011 by four Stanford business-school students to refinance their classmates' student loans with money from alumni, which grew into a national online bank. Social Finance built its early business on "HENRYs" (high earners, not rich yet), raised more than $2bn of venture money, survived a 2017 harassment scandal that cost its founding CEO his job, and under Anthony Noto (CEO fro

The largest property and casualty insurer in the United States, owned by its policyholders rather than shareholders. George J. Mecherle, a retired farmer turned insurance salesman, founded it in Bloomington, Illinois, in 1922 to sell cheap car insurance to farmers. It grew on one idea: a nationwide network of exclusive agents, each a small business owner who sells only State Farm, backed by a mutu

A Boston bank chartered in 1792 that turned itself, from the 1970s onward, into the plumbing of the investment industry: the custodian and fund administrator for tens of trillions of dollars of other people's assets, and, through State Street Investment Management (called State Street Global Advisors until June 2025), the sponsor of the first US exchange-traded fund, the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), la

The developer-first payments company founded by Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison, which turned accepting card payments online from a weeks-long bank negotiation into a few lines of code, and then built outward into billing, tax, fraud, card issuing, treasury accounts, lending, stablecoins and a payments blockchain. Businesses running on Stripe processed ~$1.9tn of total volume in 2025 (+34

A failed San Francisco banking-as-a-service (BaaS) middleware company that sat between fintech apps and small US banks. Synapse let apps such as Yotta, Juno, Copper and, until 2023, Mercury offer bank accounts, cards and savings without dealing with a bank directly: its APIs opened accounts at partner banks (Evolve Bank & Trust, Lineage Bank, AMG National Trust and American Bank), moved money amon

The largest issuer of private-label (store) credit cards in the United States. Synchrony began in 1932 as General Electric's appliance-financing arm and grew inside GE Capital into the card issuer behind Walmart, Lowe's, Amazon, Sam's Club, PayPal, TJX and thousands of smaller merchants and medical practices. GE floated it in July 2014 and split it off completely in November 2015. Its business is

The Baltimore asset manager founded in 1937 by Thomas Rowe Price Jr., the investor usually called the father of growth-stock investing. For most of its history it was the model of a disciplined, research-driven active manager: no-load funds sold directly to savers, a large share of America's 401(k) plans, and from 2002 one of the biggest target-date fund franchises in the country. Since 2021 it ha

The issuer of USDT, the largest stablecoin in the world, a dollar token used mainly as the cash leg of offshore crypto trading and as a store of dollars for people in high-inflation economies, which grew from a 2014 experiment linked to the Bitfinex exchange into a firm that reported more than $13bn of net profit in 2024 and more than $10bn in 2025 with a staff of a few hundred, by holding custome

The scrappy, trading-first Wall Street firm founded in 1923 that prided itself on hiring "PSDs" (poor, smart and with a deep desire to get rich), refused to join the 1998 rescue of Long-Term Capital Management, built one of the largest mortgage-securities machines of the 2000s, and in March 2008 became the first major casualty of the global financial crisis. Two of its in-house hedge funds collaps

The Wall Street partnership that became the archetype of the modern investment bank: founded in 1869 as a one-man commercial-paper dealer, it went public in 1999, turned itself into a bank holding company in the panic of September 2008 with $5bn from Warren Buffett and $10bn from the Treasury, paid billions for Abacus and 1MDB, spent a decade and several billion dollars trying to become a consumer

The Ohio car insurer, founded in Cleveland in 1937, that built a national business out of drivers other insurers would not cover, and then spent five decades turning pricing data into a weapon: it was the first to show rivals' rates next to its own (1993–94), among the first to sell car insurance online (1997), the pioneer of usage-based pricing (from a 1998 pilot to Snapshot), the company that tu

The Boston company that built a cloud point-of-sale system for restaurants and turned it into a payments business. Founded in 2011 by three engineers from Endeca, Toast sells restaurant-specific hardware, software for ordering, kitchens, payroll and marketing, and embedded card processing, and makes most of its gross profit from the payments that run through the terminals. It survived a near-death

The Travelers Companies is the second-largest US commercial property and casualty insurer and one of the largest writers of personal auto and homeowners insurance through independent agents. It descends from two nineteenth-century firms: St. Paul Fire and Marine (Minnesota, 1853) and The Travelers Insurance Company (Hartford, 1864), which sold America's first accident policy. Travelers spent the 1

The Charlotte-based super-regional bank created on December 6, 2019, when BB&T of Winston-Salem and SunTrust of Atlanta completed what was then the largest US bank merger since the 2008 crisis. Billed as a "merger of equals" that would fund a technology leap through scale, it delivered a painful 2022 systems conversion, a $6.1bn goodwill write-down in 2023, the sale of its prized insurance brokera

The Minneapolis super-regional, formed in 2001 when Firstar of Milwaukee bought the older U.S. Bancorp and kept its name. It became known as the most conservative large bank in the United States: it never lost money in a quarter during the 2008 crisis, took $6.6bn of TARP capital it said it did not need, and repaid it within seven months. It then learned that a reputation for prudence does not pro

The lender that promised machine learning could price consumer credit better than a FICO score. Founded in 2012 by former Google executives Dave Girouard, Anna Counselman and Paul Gu, Upstart abandoned its first idea, income-share funding of young graduates, for personal loans in 2014, won the first-ever no-action letter from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in 2017, listed on Nasdaq at $2

The mutually owned fund company that John C. Bogle built in 1974–75 after he was fired from Wellington Management, which turned an odd corporate structure (the funds own the manager, so profits come back to investors as lower fees) and an idea mocked as "Bogle's Folly" (the first retail index fund, 1976) into the second-largest asset manager in the world. By the end of 2025 Vanguard managed about

A San Francisco consumer fintech, founded in 2015 by former Lloyds and American Express executive Colin Walsh, that launched as a partner-bank app on The Bancorp Bank in 2017 and on 31 July 2020 became the first consumer fintech to win a de novo, full-service national bank charter (Varo Bank, N.A.) with FDIC insurance and Federal Reserve approval. It raised more than $1bn from investors, including

The largest card network in the world. It began as Bank of America's BankAmericard in 1958, was reorganized under Dee Hock in 1970 as a bank-owned association, renamed Visa in 1976, and went public in March 2008 in what was then the largest IPO in US history (~$17.9bn). Visa issues no cards, lends no money and signs few merchants; it runs the rules, the brand and the switch (VisaNet) that connect

A Seattle savings institution founded after the Great Seattle Fire of 1889 that, under Kerry Killinger from 1990, bought its way through more than thirty thrifts and mortgage companies to become the largest US savings and loan, a top-tier mortgage lender and servicer, and a self-styled "Wal-Mart of banking"; that then bet on option ARMs, subprime lending through Long Beach Mortgage and a high-risk

The stagecoach brand turned America's most-admired retail bank, built by Norwest's Dick Kovacevich on the doctrine of cross-selling, enlarged by the 2008 rescue purchase of Wachovia, and then disgraced when that same sales culture produced millions of accounts customers never asked for. The scandal broke in September 2016; in February 2018 the Federal Reserve capped the bank's total assets at thei

The company that taught the world to send money by wire. Western Union was founded as a telegraph company in the 1850s and started its money-transfer service in 1871. Over the following 150 years it became the largest cross-border remittance company, built on hundreds of thousands of agent locations: grocery stores, pharmacies, check cashers and post offices where migrants pay cash in one country

A London online lender founded in 2006 by two South African entrepreneurs, Errol Damelin and Jonty Hurwitz, that used automated, data-driven underwriting and a slider on a web page to make short-term loans of a few hundred pounds in minutes, grew in five years into Britain's best-known payday lender and a celebrated venture-backed "fintech" before the word was common, and then became the symbol of

America's largest person-to-person payment network, owned not by a tech company but by the big banks it was built to protect. Early Warning Services began in 1990 (verify) as a bank-owned database for spotting bad checks and fraudulent accounts. In 2016 it absorbed clearXchange, the big banks' own P2P joint venture, and in June 2017 it launched Zelle inside the mobile apps of the country's largest