M&A&War
There is a long-standing debate about whether or not mergers and acquisitions — M&A, as the cool kids say — actually contribute to a company's growth. At least, they debate these things in academia. For banks and other companies, M&A seems to follow the economy; when things are good and stock prices are up, executives get itchy to do deals. For banks, it turns out to be a good way to grab deposits, and lately M&A activity in the bank industry had been turning up after a few down years. There was Fifth Third's deal for Comerica, which at the time was the largest M&A deal in years. That was quickly bested by Banco Santander's proposed buy of Webster Financial.
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But the war may scuttle that momentum. Our Catherine Leffert reports that bank M&A activity looks murky amid the uncertainty of the Iran war. The war has already put a damper on bank-stock prices, which are often used as currency in dealmaking. And Iran seems to have made a major part of its defense attacks on economic targets – closing the Strait of Hormuz, attacking its neighbors' oil infrastructure, deploying cyber attacks against banks, threatening U.S. banks operating in the area. If that strategy's a success, it will further hurt economic growth, which will further hurt bank growth, bank stocks, and likely bankers' appetite for deals.
Global Payments CEO Cameron Bready said his company is feeling the effects of the war, as it numbers among its clients airlines that operate in the Middle East, as our John Adams detailed. "The closed airspace in the Middle East isn't ideal," Bready said, predicting "modest" headwinds should the war persist. He won't be the last CEO who has to talk about how the war is affecting their company.
So, really, like Citi CEO Jane Fraser and other bank leaders said yesterday, everything pretty much depends upon how long this war lasts and how bad the damage is.
Growth so hot it should be illegal
The hottest growth industry isn't tech, fintech, healthtech or cleantech. It's crime. Specifically financial crime.
Our Carter Pape reported on an astonishing fact yesterday: global financial crime has become a $4.4 trillion industry. That's trillion, with a T, comprising all manner of crimes and scams: drug trafficking, human trafficking, terrorist financing, bank scams, fraud scams, and money laundering. The crime business has grown at an annualized rate of 20% over the past two years. By comparison, the chip industry grew 22% in 2025, but its revenue in total was only $975 billion. At $4 trillion plus, financial crime is a bigger industry than oil, autos, and global commercial banking. And that industry is almost by its very nature a direct assault on the banking industry. Indeed, banks were fleeced for $580 billion in 2025 alone.
And these crime rings are corporations in everything but the incorporation papers. This has gone way, way beyond street crime, or even organized crime. This is industrialized crime. Author Zeke Faux encountered an organized, industrialized human-trafficking crime ring operating out of a massive industrial park in Cambodia while doing research for his book "Number Go Up," and recounted the tale in the book. The people trapped in these kinds of vast warehouses are forced to execute a variety of online scams, like the romance scams we wrote about last week. Some of these crime syndicates are sponsored by states such as North Korea, which use them as a revenue source, according to reports.
And these numbers are only going to get bigger. Money is, among other things, an incentive system, and when you have trillions of dollars out there incentivizing people to commit crimes, they are indeed going to commit crimes, on the largest scale they can manage. They tap all the latest tools at their disposal; they used crypto and now they're using AI. God forbid any of them get their hands on a working quantum computer.
The future of money
Just a reminder: On Monday, I'll be sitting down with M&T Bank CEO Rene Jones in American Banker's Leaders series to talk about how M&T finds new growth opportunities, how it fends off competition from both other banks and nonbanks, private credit, regulations, and even the changing nature of money itself. You can register here (the fields on the right-hand side) to watch on Monday the 16th at 1:30 p.m. ET.
