Analysis with a visible evidence trail

BPI has warned in general terms that a small number of technology vendors support a large share of the financial sector, without naming which ones or how many banks share them. Testing that directly against SEC filings for 58 public bank holding companies with a reviewed link to OptimaYield's $10B+ Call Report population, an unrestricted search across all filing types initially suggested broad, multi-vendor overlap — until a spot-check found the top hits were institutional-holdings reports (13F filings), not vendor disclosures at all. Restricting to filing types that can actually carry an operational disclosure cut the "any vendor mention" population by nearly half, to 14 of 58 institutions, and eliminated every case of an institution appearing to use 3 or more of the named vendors. Within that cleaner set, Fiserv stands out clearly: 10 of 58 institutions name it, more than the other three vendors with any mentions combined. Even that narrower count is not fully clean — a direct spot-check of 5 examples found 3 genuine vendor disclosures, 1 unrelated peer-benchmarking mention, and 1 mention of a one-time transaction rather than an ongoing vendor relationship.

S&P Global Market Intelligence named Central Bancompany Inc. its #1 U.S. public bank with more than $10 billion in assets for the 2025 ranking cycle, the only bank to beat the analysis median on all of what S&P calls its "seven-ranking metrics" for that tier — without naming which seven. S&P has separately, fully documented an 8-metric weighted framework in its community-bank-ranking material. Whether that is the same framework used for the public-bank tier, minus one metric, or a materially different one, is not resolved by any public source. Building the best-documented version anyway and applying it to OptimaYield's own $10B+ Call Report population, the replication does not reproduce the real result: Central Trust Bank, the bank charter beneath Central Bancompany, ranks 35th of 135 institutions, not first. Narrowing the population to exclude obviously ineligible charter types barely moves that rank (30th of 120), so the gap is not primarily a population-eligibility problem. The most likely remaining explanations — ranking the bank charter instead of the holding company, and simplified metric definitions — are disclosed but not confirmed.

DBRS Morningstar's September 2026 commentary describes US bank loan growth as broad-based. That holds up well for the largest banks: the $250B+ cohort has had at least 75% of its members growing loans for four straight quarters, and the $50-250B cohort for three straight quarters. It holds up less well at the $10-50B cohort, where breadth has flipped between broad and narrow quarter to quarter, including a narrow reading as recently as Q1 2026. Broad-based growth is also not the historical norm at any cohort — only about half of all quarters since 2016 clear that bar.

Every $10B+ asset cohort shows the same shape: liquid-asset coverage of the balance sheet surged during the 2020-2021 pandemic-era reserve buildup, peaked around Q2-Q4 2021, then declined steadily through the 2022-2023 rate-hike cycle back to roughly its pre-pandemic level, where it has stayed since. The $250B+ cohort's median rose from 33.1% to a 46.1% peak and is now at 34.2% — almost exactly where it started a decade ago. This is the real, quantified, bank-level version of the funding-risk narrative the Fed's Financial Stability Report discusses only in system-wide, qualitative terms.

BPI has argued that the FDIC's since-withdrawn 2024 brokered-deposit reclassification proposal would have caused a ~110% increase in deposits reclassified as "brokered," based on a sample of its member banks. OptimaYield's own population-scale data shows real brokered-deposit reliance already rose far more than that at every bank-size cohort — 454% to 458% at the two mid-size cohorts — but that rise happened by Q3 2023, roughly a year before the proposal existed, and lines up with the March 2023 regional-bank funding-stress episode, not with anticipation of any specific rule. This article cannot confirm or refute BPI's specific figure, which describes a hypothetical rule's modeled impact rather than a historical fact — but it can show what actually happened, and when.

48 of 157 banks (30.6%) in OptimaYield's $10B+ detailed population exceeded the interagency 300%-of-capital commercial real estate concentration guideline as of June 30, 2026. That is not a new development for most of them: 32 of the 48 have been above the line for all 12 of the trailing quarters available — at least three straight years — and only 4 crossed it for the first time this quarter. Concentration alone did not predict elevated delinquency this quarter, but the trend in delinquency tells a different story than the snapshot: the $10-50B cohort's own CRE delinquency rate just reached its highest point in a decade.

The FDIC's Q2 2026 Quarterly Banking Profile reported a $317.4 billion system-wide rise in estimated uninsured deposits. Within the 151 banks in OptimaYield's detailed Call Report layer with a verified uninsured-deposit ratio in both Q1 and Q2 2026, the matched increase was $291.75 billion — 91.9% of the FDIC's system-wide figure — and five banks (JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley Bank, and Bank of America) accounted for $280.77 billion of it: 88.5% of the entire system-wide increase. JPMorgan Chase alone was responsible for a third of it, at a ratio that is now the highest point in its own decade of reported history.