Citi's M&A bankers & Morgan Stanley's traders are the outliers in 2025
Banks’ Q3 reporting season is more or less over, with just a few European stragglers left in the next few days, which means it’s worth asking: who's done best so far in 2025? And who's done worst?
Well, it’s complicated, and never easy to compare like-for-like. In a nutshell, across the first nine months of the year, most banks did decently somewhere or another, and poorly somewhere or another – but there are some exceptions.
Citi’s M&A team, which grew revenues by 41% in the first nine months of 2025 compared to 2024, is one. Although the firm had a lackluster increase in M&A revenue in Q3, its Q1 and Q2 M&A performances were great, and the bank credited “numerous sectors” both times for the increase.
Citi even said that financial sponsor (private equity firms) activity was behind its M&A revenue increase in Q2. This was despite market intelligence provider LSEG (formerly Refinitiv) noting that private equity-backed M&A grew more slowly than the rest of the market during that time period.
Morgan Stanley’s equities sales & trading team was also a notable positive. Morgan Stanley's equities revenues increased by 34% in the first nine months of 2025 compared to the same period in 2024. The bank credited its prime brokerage as the main driving force as well as a “volatile” trading environment and its Asian performance. However, Morgan Stanley's fixed income, commodities, and currencies (FICC) traders performed worst among their peers for revenue growth across the nine-month period.
One of the other negative outliers in the first nine months of the year was Barclays. Barclays’ M&A revenues declined 2.1% in the first nine months of 2025, while M&A revenues at other major banks rose. Barclays' equity capital markets also underperformed the rest, as did it equities salespeople. Only its fixed income traders outperformed most rivals.
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