The annual ranking of the best-performing banks with more than $50 billion in assets, compiled by Capital Performance Group for American Banker from S&P Global Market Intelligence data, sorts institutions by three-year average return on average equity using year-end 2025 figures. The top ten, in order: First Citizens, Raymond James, East West, JPMorganChase, Cullen/Frost, Northern Trust, Zions, Western Alliance, Morgan Stanley, and Fifth Third.
The list's own architects have explained what it took to land on it. "It's spread-based traditional banking or fee-based wealth management," Ally Akins of Capital Performance Group told American Banker, "or some mix of both." That sentence is doing more work than it appears to. The list is one ranking of two different businesses, and the label on the door is increasingly the only thing they share.
The two machines on one list
The spread banks look like the textbook image of a bank. Cullen/Frost carries the cohort's highest net interest margin at 3.76 percent. East West Bank posts 3.42 percent, Western Alliance 3.51 percent, First Citizens 3.25 percent, all above the group's 2.89 percent average. These institutions make money the traditional way: cheap deposits in, loans out, spread in between. Their margins come from who their customers are and where those customers live, not from any product invented recently.
Then there are the other entries, which earn like asset managers and brokerages. Morgan Stanley, ninth on the list, has the cohort's lowest net interest margin, 1.04 percent, barely a bank's margin at all. Northern Trust, sixth, runs a 1.72 percent margin. Neither is suffering. Morgan Stanley recorded $70.6 billion in net revenue and $16.9 billion in net income for 2025, with client assets up $1.4 trillion to $9.3 trillion. Northern Trust manages $1.8 trillion in assets and administers $18.7 trillion in custody, with trust fees rising 6 percent. For these institutions the balance sheet is the plumbing, not the product. The money is made on fees over other people's money, and the net interest margin is almost irrelevant. Raymond James, second, is a hybrid: a brokerage and investment bank whose loan book grew 13.31 percent, yet whose identity is advice, not lending.
JPMorganChase, fourth, is the exception that proves the rule, the only firm on the list that runs both machines at scale: $185.6 billion in revenue, a 20 percent return on tangible common equity, and a balance sheet of $4.42 trillion. Everyone else on the list picked a lane.
What the yardstick actually rewards
The ranking metric, return on average equity, explains the strange company the spread banks keep. Return on equity rewards efficiency with capital, and nothing is more capital-efficient than a fee business. A wealth manager's revenue needs almost no risk-weighted assets behind it: no loans, no loss reserves, no capital held against a balance sheet it barely uses. Morgan Stanley's efficiency ratio of 68.4 percent, which its chief executive Ted Pick called a demonstration of the platform's operating leverage, coexists with a 1.04 percent net interest margin because the ratio and the margin describe different businesses sharing one charter.
So the list's second half is not really ranking banks. It is ranking brokerages and trust companies that happen to hold bank charters, and it is ranking them with a yardstick, return on equity, that is structurally rigged in their favor. The fascinating part is not that Morgan Stanley and Northern Trust rank high. It is that anyone still files them under the same word as Cullen/Frost.
The spreads are franchises, not products
The spread banks, for their part, reveal how much of traditional banking success is inherited geography. Cullen/Frost's 3.76 percent margin is a Texas institution's margin: a deposit base built over generations, an average customer credit score of 775, and a lending book where 40 percent of new loans go to people new to the bank, which is what a trusted regional looks like. East West's 3.42 percent is a cross-border franchise, the U.S.-Asia corridor it has served for decades. Western Alliance's 3.51 percent sits on specialty deposits, including escrow businesses that grew roughly 40 percent in 2025.
None of that is replicable by a competitor with a better product. It is replicable only by decades of being the bank those customers already trust. The ranking is, among other things, a census of moats: not the moats of technology or scale, but the older kind, built of place and relationship. The spread banks are not winning because they are cleverer. They are winning because they are theirs.
The ten, one by one
The detail rewards a closer pass. First Citizens, first, is a $229.7 billion institution still digesting its acquisitions, with the Silicon Valley Bank integration substantially complete and 138 branches bought from BMO; its wealth assets grew at a double-digit rate to $61 billion, and its chief executive Frank Holding says 2026 will focus on deposit growth. Raymond James, second at $88.8 billion, grew loans 13.31 percent, the second-fastest on the list, and lists its businesses as advice, wealth management, investment banking, asset management, brokerage, and banking, in that order. East West, third, runs its U.S.-Asia corridor from Pasadena, and its chief executive Dominic Ng attributes the result to staying nimble, disciplined, and responsive. JPMorganChase, fourth, reported $185.6 billion in revenue and $57.0 billion in net income, moved nearly $12 trillion a day, and safeguards over $41 trillion in assets; its chief executive Jamie Dimon counts eight straight years of record revenue.
Cullen/Frost, fifth, earned $642 million in 2025, up 11.5 percent, which its chief executive Phillip Green called an all-time high achieved despite the Federal Reserve cutting rates by 0.75 percent. Northern Trust, sixth, posted record net interest income of $2.4 billion and revenue of $8.1 billion, and ranked first among banks by reputation with noncustomers. Zions, seventh, lifted net interest income 8 percent to $2.7 billion on disciplined deposit pricing, with retail and business banking fees up 11.9 percent. Western Alliance, eighth, grew core deposits 20.42 percent, more than three times the group average, on specialty escrow business growing roughly 40 percent, yet fell two spots because its return on equity lagged. Morgan Stanley, ninth, produced its record year on $9.3 trillion of client assets. Fifth Third, tenth, ran the cohort's lowest expense growth at 3.48 percent and expanded net interest income 6 percent on 21 basis points of margin expansion, while investing in the Southeast and in technology-led products. Two recipes, ten institutions, and a list that now spans everything from a Salt Lake City commercial bank to a global securities franchise.
What the list cannot see
One more limitation, structural this time. The ranking uses a three-year average, which makes it a photograph of the recent past. 2025 was a good year for the old model: short-term rates fell, long-term rates stayed high, and the whole industry's margins improved, as Capital Performance Group's Matthew Prince noted. A merger-friendly regulatory environment lifted fee income alongside it. A three-year average is long enough to smooth one quarter's noise and short enough to miss a full cycle. It measures who was well positioned for the past, not who is positioned for the next downturn.
That is not a flaw in the ranking. Every ranking is a photograph. It is only worth saying that the photograph's subjects, this year, do not all belong to the same species.
The movement within the list makes the same point from the other direction. Western Alliance posted some of the cohort's strongest growth numbers, core deposits up 20.42 percent and noninterest income up 25 percent, and fell two spots anyway, because return on equity is the filter and its equity base grew with it. Cullen/Frost slipped one spot despite record earnings, and Fifth Third climbed one on expense discipline rather than growth. The ranking rewards what a three-year average captures, and what it captures, more than anything else in 2025, is who entered the year with the right mix of franchise and restraint. The list's authors say as much themselves: there was not one recipe for landing on it, there were two, or a mix of both. The interesting question is which recipe the next photograph will show, and whether the word "bank" will still be the label on the frame.
The label is doing the work
The list's real story is not who won. It is that the word "bank" now covers two industries whose economics have almost nothing in common, and the ranking, by putting both under one word and one metric, has quietly documented the migration. The most bank-like institutions on the list, Cullen/Frost and East West and Zions, succeed by holding deposits and making loans in places they know. The least bank-like, Morgan Stanley and Northern Trust, succeed by never really needing to. Both pass the same test, return on equity, and the test passes the ones that least resemble its original subject.
American Banker's headline asks which banks performed best in 2025. The answer, read carefully, is that half the winners were in a different business wearing the same charter, and the business they were in is the one banking has been drifting toward for a generation: balance-sheet-light, fee-fed, and barely a bank at all.
Primary sources
- American Banker's reporting by Maria Volkova for the ranking, the full metrics for each of the ten institutions, and the comments from Capital Performance Group's Ally Akins and Matthew Prince.
- Capital Performance Group's published description of the ranking methodology, including the three-year average return on average equity, the S&P Global Market Intelligence data, and the exclusion thresholds.