1. JP Morgan Chase ($2,533 billion)
2. Bank of America ($2,281 billion)
3. Wells Fargo $1,951 billion
4. Citibank $1,843 billion
5. Goldman Sachs $916 billion
Morgan Stanley $851 billion
7. US Bankcorp $461 billion
TD Bank $380 billion
9. HSBC $273 billion
American Express 10 $181bn
When it comes to deciding where to put one's money for safekeeping, the options for banks and credit unions seem limitless. Of course, small local and regional financial institutions can be trusted with your hard-earned money, but for full-service and comprehensive banking, the largest national banks reign supreme. According to the Federal Reserve, these ten financial institutions have the most assets in the United States. Our top ten banks in America are listed below.
JPMorgan-Chase
As of the end of last year, JPMorgan-Chase was the largest bank in the United States and the sixth-largest in the world, according to the Federal Reserve. This places it first on our list of the top ten banks. The company was formed by the merger of two much older banks, J.P. Morgan and Company and Chase Manhattan Corporation, in 2000. While the J.P. Morgan name is used for investment banking and private wealth management, the bank operates as Chase for retail and commercial banking.
The company is named after the 19th-century financial titan John Pierpont Morgan, who founded the original J.P. Morgan Bank, but Aaron Burr, an early American politician and notorious duelist, was one of its founders. Despite controversies and legal woes over alleged energy price fixing and negligence during the Bernard Madoff scandal, which resulted in billions of dollars in fines, the House of Morgan brought in $96.6 billion in revenue last year.
The Bank of America
The presence of Bank of America's headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina, alone makes that city one of the country's largest financial centers. Though it is not the largest bank, this company is the world's largest wealth management firm because it owns Merrill Lynch, a behemoth in the industry.
Bank of America has approximately 50 million retail banking customers, but it had modest beginnings. It all started with a small institution serving immigrants in San Francisco at the turn of the century called the Bank of Italy. Bank of America briefly entered the Chinese finance market by acquiring a stake in Chinese Construction Bank, which it later sold.
The company has worked to keep its Charlotte and New York headquarters eco-friendly and LEED certified, but it has also been accused of mortgage fraud in a number of lawsuits since 2010.
Wells Fargo & Company
Wells Fargo has long been associated with San Francisco, where it is still headquartered, as it was founded by two Northeasterners to capitalize on the Gold Rush. Wells Fargo is the largest bank in the world by one measure, market capitalization, though it has fought China's Industrial and Commercial Bank for that title in recent years.
Wells Fargo holds the United States' oldest continuously operating bank charter, which was originally granted to the First National Bank of Philadelphia. Wells Fargo pays the most in corporate taxes of any US company each year, but has been accused of tax evasion.
Citi
Citi Bank, formerly the City Bank of New York, was regarded as the East Coast equivalent to Wells Fargo during the nineteenth century, when both banks were purely regional. Citi was also the first United States bank to open a banking office in a foreign country, having expanded to Argentina in 1914. Nowadays only 26 percent of Citi's branch offices are in the United States, though they generate 51 percent of the bank's revenue.
Reference
Top 10 Banks in US
US Bancorp/U.S. Bank
The current US Bancorp (which includes U.S. Bank) is the result of the combination of major regional banks from the West and Midwest. The company holds $389 billion in assets, as well as $250 billion in deposits, from 16 million customers. Banks were prohibited by law from using """"United States"""" in their names in 1913, and US Bancorp was among the last firms to be allowed to do so, having appended the phrase to its name the previous year.
PNC
Pittsburgh-based PNC is primarily a regional financial institution, operating mostly on the East Coast, but with offices in nineteen states as well as Washington, DC. PNC actually has two historical meanings - Pittsburgh National Corporation and Providence National Corporation, both Pennsylvania banks that merged to form the beginnings of the current company. They decided to use just the acronym thereafter because of the coincidence of their names. PNC was an early adopter of """"virtual wallet"""" services among traditional banks, and is known for its yearly index of the prices of items from the Christmas carol, """"The Twelve Days of Christmas.""""
Bank of New York Mellon
The Bank of New York was founded in 1784 by none other than the very first Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Bank of New York Mellon is the direct successor organization of that firm, after having merged with T. Mellon and Sons, a Pittsburgh institution that financed the steel and fuel industries. This long history makes it the oldest banking corporation in the country. It holds $27.9 trillion in assets under custody, so it is the world's largest custodian bank catering to other financial institutions.
State Street
Boston's State Street Corporation originated as a shipping financing firm. It still does business that is similar in spirit, focusing on global banking services and investment management to overseas institutional investors. State Street was involved in a landmark court case in 1998 that found a computer algorithm can be patented in the US.
Capital One
Capital One is primarily a retail banking operation, providing largely credit cards, auto loans and home loans in addition to checking and savings services. Originally a pure credit card company, Capital One expanded into banking in earnest in 2005. Early in 2014 Capital One was criticized for changing its customer terms of service to allow the bank to contact customers in any manner it chose, including deliberately deceiving them with fake phone caller IDs.
TD Bank
The final institution in our top 10 bank list isn't actually headquartered in the United States; the Toronto-Dominion Bank is quite naturally based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Over 22 million people worldwide are TD Bank clients, mostly in the US and Canada. TD has branches in quite remote locations, including Canada's Northwest Territories and the Yukon.
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