5 Financial Brands to Watch in 2025
Cash App, SoFi, JPMorgan Chase, Vanguard and PNC Bank are embracing both rapidly changing technology and human-powered decision-making to drive customer growth and retention. With fintech startups nipping at the heels of traditional banks, the race is on.
By Lynnley Browning
From deploying fast-changing artificial intelligence tools to hyper-targeting customer demographics while maintaining a single brand identity, financial services companies face a host of challenges. Here’s a look at five retail-focused financial brands to watch in 2025.
Cash App
Legacy banks like Morgan Stanley have long offered their top-tier credit cardholders exclusive perks like special-access tickets to concerts, music festivals and museums, with holders of the luxury cards able to access VIP lounges and artist meet-and-greets. Much of that plastic carries substantial annual fees and requires strong credit scores and high annual incomes, putting it out of reach for millions of ordinary consumers.
Cash App, a digital financial services platform that acts like a bank, is betting that the market for ticket-seeking fans — and broader financial inclusivity — is much bigger. In December, the company offered its prepaid Visa debit cardholders pre-sale tickets for the U.S. dates of an upcoming tour by Kendrick Lamar and SZA. Cash App’s card, which doesn’t require a bank account or credit approval and is issued by Sutton Bank, allows the Oakland, CA-based company to smash through the biggest selling point of luxury credit cards: high-priced exclusivity available only to the wealthy elite.
With nearly 25 million American households either unbanked or underbanked and using nontraditional financial services as a solution, not just perks are in Cash Appa’s arsenal. Owned by Block, whose CEO is Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, the company claims 57 million users of its direct deposit, investing and peer-to-peer payments services, including 24 million prepaid debit cardholders.
SoFi
SoFi Technologies, a "direct bank" that exists only online, is betting big on alternative investments for mainstream investors. The category, which includes everything from real estate, derivatives and private equity funds to cryptocurrencies, private debt and commodities, will more than double to over $30 trillion in global assets by 2030, financial data provider Preqin forecasts. The investments offer potentially higher returns and portfolio diversification but are also riskier. Bank of America Private Bank’s 2024 study of wealthy Americans found that 93% of those aged 21 to 43 said they were more likely to allocate more to alts in the next few years.
Typically available only to accredited investors (annual income of $200,000 individually or $300,000 jointly, or net worth exceeding $1 million, excluding your primary residence), alts wrapped inside mutual funds made their way onto SoFi’s platform last January, when the company rolled out offerings for its 10 million users from heavyweights KKR, Carlyle, Franklin Templeton and ARK focused on private credit, real estate and pre-initial public offerings. San Francisco-based SoFi, which offers loans, investments, credit cards and mortgages, also began offering alts for a 0.25% fee through its new robo-advising platform, launched in November 2024 with BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager. The platform now includes two new investing themes — "Classic with Alternatives," a mix of stocks, bonds, real estate and multi-strategy funds; and "Sustainable," or stocks and bond funds with favorable environmental, social, and governance practices.
JPMorganChase
Legacy Wall Street banks that braid strong technology and digital offerings into in-person financial advisory services stand the best chance of capturing a slice of the estimated $105 trillion that will pass to younger American heirs by 2048. Just one in five heirs use their parents’ financial advisor, Cerulli Associates says, making technology that meets their tech-savvy needs and expectations critical to retaining or gaining them as clients.
America’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, spends more on technology than any other US bank
($17 billion in 2024, with half on innovation and modernization). Its digital and app-based Wealth
Plan, a personal finance tool for planning, budgeting, saving and investing that launched in December 2022, operates from findings that people who makes plans are more likely to make investments. The tool now has more than 10 million users. Earlier this year, it rolled out LLM Suite, a generative in-house AI tool, or "agent," for JPM asset management and wealth management employees that is likened to an investment research analyst. "AI agents are taking a much bigger role and are going to be a big development in 2025," says Armel Leslie, executive managing director at communications and consulting agency RF|Binder in New York. "Things are moving very fast in that arena."
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Vanguard
The $10 trillion asset management giant made its name selling low-cost index funds to millions of ordinary investors, a no-frills strategy that relies for returns on market-tracking indexes, not stock-picking portfolio managers. Now its new CEO, Salim Ramji, is quietly expanding the company’s active management business, a seemingly counterintuitive twist to the house that founder Jack Bogle built.
Despite being synonymous with passive investing, Vanguard over five decades has quietly become one of the largest managers of actively managed funds in the world, with over $1.8 trillion in active assets and more than 75 U.S.-based actively managed funds spanning stocks and bonds. The company launched its first actively managed exchange traded funds in 2018. In November, it debuted two actively managed municipal bond funds. At the time, Sara Devereux, the global head of Vanguard’s fixed income group, declared that an actively managed ETF wrapper was "becoming an essential for many investors."
The growth rate of active ETFs has surged more than 20% a year since 2019, pushing total market share in the ETF industry to 8.5%, Morningstar says. Vanguard’s further push under Ramji, a former BlackRock executive, into active management dovetails with its focus on another business line dependent on a hand’s on approach: financial advisory services. On Dec. 9, the firm launched an Advice & Wealth Management unit.
PNC
Among super-regional banks, PNC was fast out of the gate to embrace financial technology, offering mobile tools for account management and blending digital banking with personalized human interaction at its 2,300 branches. But its real work has been behind the scenes on integrating its lines of business, from commercial banking to wealth management, a challenge that involves weaving together a customer’s deposit and investment experiences. In September, the $565 billion bank announced a deal with Plaid, a maker of software that lets banks and other fintech companies plug their customers’ financial accounts into apps like Venmo and Robinhood. "It’s not a super sexy kind of thing, but they’ve always been innovative from a tech perspective," says Ron Shevlin, the chief research officer at bank consulting firm Cornerstone Advisors in Scottdale, AZ.
