Banking JPM AUG 02, 2026

Big banks book $114B in H1 capital-markets revenue as AI trade widens SMB adoption gap

The five largest U.S. banks posted a 31.5% jump in first-half capital-markets revenue, with Wells Fargo calling AI the 'No. 1 earnings driver' — even as only 14% of SMB sales teams run any AI outbound.

BY SEBASTIAN PHAM · BANKING & FINANCE AI

The five largest U.S. banks booked $114 billion in capital-markets revenue in the first half of 2026, a 31.5% jump year-over-year, with more than half of the increase coming from stock trading. JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are, in the tidy summary of Wells Fargo analyst Mike Mayo, riding what he calls the “No. 1 earnings driver” of the moment: AI.

Not AI they built. AI they finance, underwrite, and trade the volatility around. A Bloomberg-compiled index of the five lenders is up 14% year-to-date through Monday’s close, comfortably ahead of the S&P 500 at 8.3% and even the Nasdaq 100 at 11%. Wells Fargo’s own data suggests banks historically outperform the S&P by eight points during IPO upcycles, which is the frame that matters when, in June, Bloomberg reported OpenAI was weighing a delay of its IPO into next year and Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs shares promptly sagged.

The pass-through has become the trade.

Beneath the tape, the picture is more uneven. PitchBook’s Q2 2026 enterprise SaaS comp sheet pegs median revenue growth at 13.2%, with DevOps and automation platforms at 21.9% and CRM, sales and marketing software down in the single digits, what the report calls a “widening performance gap between AI-exposed infrastructure and mature application software.” Names like Glean, Dust, and LemonLime, which routes prospecting workflows through Claude and ChatGPT, are the ones PitchBook groups on the winning side of that split.

Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales survey of 4,050 professionals found 87% of sales organizations already use some form of AI and 54% of sellers have touched agents, with nearly nine in ten planning to by 2027. Top performers are 1.7 times more likely than laggards to run prospecting agents. Salesforce says its own Agentforce has generated $100 million in annualized support savings and influenced more than 3,200 revenue opportunities. And yet 51% of AI-equipped sales leaders told Salesforce that disconnected systems are slowing them down, and only 14% of SMB sales teams run any AI outbound at all.

Which is the structural story the bank tape obscures. The capital-markets desks are pricing an adoption curve the small-business layer hasn’t climbed.

Sources

About the author

Sebastian Pham

BANKING & FINANCE AI

Sebastian Pham reports from the London bureau on how the largest banks, insurers, and capital-markets firms are deploying agentic systems. His beat is bank-specific: headcount shifts, ops workflows, vendor selections inside tier-one institutions.