Peeling the Onion: A Structural View of U.S. Bank Holding Companies

When market observers talk about a “bank,” they are generally not referring to a single legal entity. Instead, large domestic banking organizations are almost always organized according to a bank holding company (BHC) structure, in which a U.S. parent holding company controls up to several thousand separate subsidiaries. This hierarchy of controlled entities generally includes domestic commercial banks primarily focused on lending and deposit-taking as well as a range of nonbanking and foreign firms engaged in a diverse set of business activities, such as securities dealing and underwriting, insurance, real estate, private equity, leasing and trust services, asset management, and so on. In this post, we present some results of our article and contribution to the special EPR banking volume, “A Structural View of U.S. Bank Holding Companies,” which uses public regulatory data to document trends and stylized facts about the size, organizational complexity, and scope of large U.S. BHCs.