BREAKINGVIEWS-Fintech wins 2025’s most lucrative league table

By Stephen Gandel

NEW YORK, Jan 6 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Donald Trump’s presidency has been very good for the nation’s largest banks. As the administration trims restrictive post-crisis regulations, dealmaking has roared back, producing enviable results for Wall Street and lifting lenders’ stocks. That’s great for CEOs like JPMorgan JPM.N boss Jamie Dimon, whose stash of 6.5 million common shares implies a gain of some $566 million, excluding unvested awards. Some of the digital upstarts looking to unseat traditional financiers, though, did even better.

True, Wall Street has been on a tear. Once-laggard Citigroup’s C.N stock performed the best of the big banks, jumping by 67% over the course of the last year. Goldman’s shares rose 53%, while JPMorgan’s climbed by 34%. Dimon’s holdings left him with the biggest benefit, but other executives did well, too. Goldman CEO David Solomon pocketed around $43 million, judging by his disclosed stash of the bank's common shares; Citi head Jane Fraser, over $13 million.

Some insurgent technologists, though, made out even better. Look at Vlad Tenev, the CEO and founder of Robinhood HOOD.O, the standard bearer of a new age of app-enabled retail trading and even retirement planning. The company’s shares nearly tripled over 2025. Based on his holdings according to Robinhood's most recent proxy filing, that implies a massive gain of $3.3 billion, a figure only slightly reduced when stripping out some stock sales since.

Then there are the kingpins of cryptocurrencies, which Dimon once dismissed by saying that “bitcoin is worthless.” A rush of initial public offerings from the likes of exchange operators Gemini Space Station GEMI.O or Bullish BLSH.N produced yet more paper wealth. Based on the wild leap in shares of stablecoin provider Circle Internet Group from their June offering price, CEO and founder Jeremy Allaire should be richer by around $900 million.

Yes, the administration’s deregulatory push will benefit the biggest banks. Yet focusing on this misses the scope of potential changes it is unleashing. The White House has strongly embraced crypto. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped enforcement cases against key industry figures. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, once the de-facto regulator for consumer financial technology firms, has been stripped back. All of this could help new and disruptive competitors in providing payments, wealth management or even bank accounts flourish unchecked.

To conclude that this will definitely happen from one year’s stock-market moves is folly. But these results indicate that investors increasingly see it as a possibility. Bankers eagerly planning how to spend their newfound fortunes would do well to remember that the administration is not just opening doors for them, but also rivals who could crimp their futures.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Robinhood's stock nearly tripled in 2025, resulting in a gain of over $3 billion for CEO and founder Vlad Tenev, based on his disclosed holdings of the company's shares. Similarly, shares of stablecoin provider Circle soared following its initial public offering in June. Boss Jeremy Allaire sold roughly 2 million shares in the IPO and retained about 18 million, according to filings.