The bank reported on Wednesday that Q1 2026 net income was $8.6 billion, with earnings per share up 25% to $1.11, which is the highest level in almost 20 years. On a media call, Borthwick pointed to AI as an increasingly important driver, highlighting a new internal tool for financial advisors.

The Meeting Journey tool helps advisors prepare for client meetings by pulling together key information. BofA has about 18,000 financial advisors across its wealth management platform, serving millions of clients, he said. Before meeting with a client, advisors regularly need to update themselves with a wide range of information such as client history, recent activity, and CIO guidance, he explained. 

The tool searches and consolidates client relationship insights and recent activity into ready-to-use prep materials and, with client consent, acts as an AI notetaker during virtual meetings. It also summarizes meeting decisions and next steps based on those notes. The goal is to cut down hours of manual prep and free advisors to focus on client relationships.

“Efforts like this translate into results,” Borthwick said, pointing to record first-quarter revenue and improved cost control. 

Preparing for meetings once meant pulling data from multiple systems; now much of that work is automated, he said. “Not necessarily the judgment—that can be human,” Borthwick added. The bank invests around $13.5 billion annually in technology, including approximately $4 billion on new initiatives like AI.

More broadly, BofA’s strong quarter was driven by several factors:
—Net interest income rose 9% to $15.9 billion as loan and deposit growth accelerated.
—Trading revenue hit $6.3 billion—its best in roughly 15 years—boosted by a record high 30% jump in equities.
—Investment banking fees climbed 21% to $1.8 billion on a solid M&A market.
—Asset management fees grew 15% to $4.2 billion.
—Productivity gains, including from AI, helped the company maintain cost discipline and improve its efficiency ratio by 170 basis points to 61%. 

With revenues outpacing expenses, BofA achieved its third consecutive quarter of operating leverage at 2.9%. This week, Morningstar raised its fair value estimate for BofA to $65 per share, up from $58.

Amid ongoing uncertainty around geopolitics, rates, and credit, Borthwick said the bank’s data shows a resilient U.S. consumer. Unemployment remains at around 4.3%, supporting spending, while a recent rise in gas outlays hasn’t materially changed the broader picture, he said. “You can see that in our asset quality,” he added.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

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Christopher Filiaggi was appointed interim CFO of Corebridge Financial, Inc. (NYSE: CRBG), effective April 24. Filiaggi, chief accounting officer of Corebridge since 2023, will serve as interim CFO while the company prepares for its planned merger with Equitable Holdings, Inc. This appointment follows the previously announced transition of CFO Elias Habayeb. Prior to his current role, Filiaggi held finance leadership positions with Corebridge and American International Group, Inc.

Sean McCabe was appointed CFO of Cineverse, an entertainment technology company (Nasdaq: CNVS), effective April 20. He succeeds Mark Lindsey, with whom the company is in discussions to transition into a senior financial consulting role. McCabe previously served as VP and corporate controller at Cineverse in 2023 and 2024. He returns from Freestar, an ad-tech company, where he led accounting and finance teams and worked on mergers and acquisitions, treasury, and capital structure optimization. Before joining Freestar and Cineverse, McCabe held controller positions at Jukin Media, Fulgent Genetics, and National Grid.

Big Deal

BridgeWise’s inaugural “State of AI for Wealth in 2026” report finds that 78% of respondents globally are using AI tools for investment-related queries, with nearly half (45.7%) emerging as power users, consulting AI “always” or “often” when seeking investment information. The global study is based on 2,100 respondents across 19 countries.

The report also introduces a Global Wealth AI Optimism Index, a proprietary benchmark that evaluates the 19 included countries through four weighted pillars: adoption (AI usage frequency), confidence (trust in AI accuracy), edge (perceived competitive advantage when using AI for investing), and momentum (intent to replace traditional investment research with AI).

Going deeper

“From wool sneakers to GPUs: Allbirds’ desperate AI pivot and 600% stock surge, explained” is a Fortune article by Phil Wahba.

On Wednesday, Allbirds, a sustainable footwear brand, “announced that it had secured $50 million in financing to turn itself into a tech company with a ‘long-term vision to become a fully integrated GPU-as-a-service (GPUaaS) and AI-native cloud solutions provider’ and that it would change its name to NewBird AI,” Wahba writes. You can read more here.

Overheard

“When people understand how their work drives the company’s value, they act like owners: they innovate, they solve problems, and they stay.”

—Vicente Reynal, chairman, president, and CEO of Ingersoll Rand, writes in a Fortune opinion piece titled “Here’s how employee ownership helped drive more than 8x enterprise value growth.”

When George Cherchian attended an open home in Sydney’s west recently, he was on the look out for one thing. A key detail would indicate how much competition he would have in vying for the house.

He attended every inspection for the property prior to the scheduled auction date. And when he didn’t see it, the buyers agent knew he was in a good position.

“I went to every single open home, and what I look for there is essentially the same faces. So if I’m seeing your face at every open I go to for one particular property, it tells me that you are just as interested in it as my clients are, or as I am,” he told Yahoo Finance.

“But that wasn’t the case here, we didn’t have any sort of repeat faces.”

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In the end, he put an offer in ahead of the planned auction date. Despite it being considerably lower than the advertised asking price, the vendor ultimately accepted it.

On behalf of the buyer, he secured the Baulkham Hills property for $1.9 million, $200,000 below the $2.1 million asking price.

Cherchian explained that in this particular case the vendor was in a position “where they couldn’t really afford to defer the settlement” as they had to sell because they had committed to buying another property.

But as “caution” grips property markets in Australia’s capital cities thanks to rising interest rates, higher fuel prices, ongoing uncertainty with the Iran war and impending policy changes around the taxation of investment properties, Cherchian said the sale is emblematic of the opportunities buyers can find right now in a less competitive market.

“Now that there are not as many buyers to contend with, there’s almost a bit of a window of opportunity for those who are able to make a decision,” he told Yahoo Finance.

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Overall, he said many buyers in Sydney were showing increased “caution” during so much uncertainty. As a result, “the things that need to transact, they are transacting at a discount”.

Auction clearance rates in Sydney and Melbourne dropped in March, with the most recent results from April showing a clearance rate of just 54 per cent in Sydney, according to Domain, about 10 per cent lower than at the same time last year.

Dwelling prices went backwards in Sydney and Melbourne in the March quarter this year, according to property data giant Cotality. Prices fell 0.6 per cent in Melbourne and 0.2 per cent in Sydney.

Story continues

Meanwhile this week, ANZ cut its forecast for capital city property price growth to be below inflation in 2026 in the face of weak consumer confidence, rising interest rates and the Middle East war.

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“There are still some who recognise that uncertainty can create opportunity. They’re asking whether this is a chance to secure better terms, and in some cases, it is,” Cherchian said.

“It is definitely is a good time, especially for first time buyers” who don’t need to time a sale with an existing property.

NSW broker Nathan Linton who works further north of the city, told Yahoo Finance of a similar success story recently for one of his clients that he got approved in November but had been struggling for months to secure a property.

“I’m having clients that are having success buying at reasonable prices, probably because there’s less competition at the moment,” he said, pointing to a backdrop of “fear and mystery”.

“This particular client, we did a quick digital evaluation (on a desired property), and it was worth $1.4 million. And he’s gone in there, attended the auction, and they let it go for $1.21 million,” he told Yahoo.

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“I think the good news story that people kind of like to hear sometimes is that there’s still opportunity. And maybe in a market where everyone’s scared, it’s a good time to be buying because you can have a bargain.”

Linton runs a subreddit called ‘Asked a Broker’ where he shared the recent anecdote and was met with similar stories from other Aussies.

“We just bought ours … for $300k under what it last sold for a few years ago!” one Melbourne buyer commented.

“We lowballed not expecting anything and were happy to walk away given all the uncertainty but they said yes. Definitely a lot of fear out there.”

While rising interest rates crimp borrowing power, Linton also agreed the current conditions could help first home buyers with a big enough deposit.

The broker said rising interest rates will impact buyers a little differently depending on their profile. As an example, each standard increase of 0.25 per cent in the RBA’s official cash rate would mean:

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• A single person with an income of $100,000 and no dependents would see their borrowing capacity reduced by $12,000.

• A married couple with one child and a household income of $200,000 would see their borrowing power reduced by about $25,000 for each interest rate hike.

The higher the borrowing amount the bigger the overall numerical impact, he noted, with most banks and brokers in the industry indicating the average home loan would see borrowing capacity reduced by $25,000 to $30,000 with each 0.25 interest rate increase.

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• Key insight: Mastercard’s acquisition of BVNK was a hedge against irrelevance. It suggests that the companies that defined the last era of finance are now preparing for a very different future.
• What’s at stake: Many of today’s financial institutions will not survive in their current form.
• Forward look: Banks, brokerages and payment firms still possess enormous advantages in customer trust, regulatory expertise and distribution. The question is whether they transform quickly enough to remain central to the financial system, or end up on the outside looking in.

When Mastercard recently announced it would acquire stablecoin infrastructure firm BVNK for up to $1.8 billion, it wasn’t just another banking headline. It was a massive, flashing signal. One of the most entrenched players in global payments is preparing for a world where money doesn’t move through traditional rails at all. 

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For years, financial institutions treated blockchain as a hedge, not a priority. They launched pilot programs, stood up innovation labs and issued press releases, but stopped short of meaningful integration. The goal wasn’t to transform their businesses. It was to signal they wouldn’t be left behind. 

Now these firms are writing billion-dollar checks to ensure they won’t be.

The Mastercard news is the latest evidence that blockchain infrastructure is quietly becoming real financial infrastructure. 

JPMorganChase’s blockchain-based payments network, now called Kinexys by J.P. Morgan, has processed more than $1.5 trillion in transactions and moves billions of dollars daily for institutional clients across currencies and time zones. What started as an internal project now operates as a 24/7 settlement network using real corporate payments and liquidity flows.

At the same time, asset managers are bringing investment products onto blockchain rails. BlackRock has launched tokenized funds, expanded digital asset offerings, and is building teams around tokenization, stablecoins and market structure — not as pilots, but as business lines intended to scale globally. These products allow assets like Treasury bills to move digitally, shrinking the gap between cash management and markets that increasingly operate around the clock.

These examples and others represent an uncomfortable truth: Many of today’s financial institutions will not survive in their current form.

Today’s traditional financial system is built around silos. Increasingly, technology is making these structures obsolete.

Consumers bank in one place, invest in another, make payments through separate networks, borrow through specialized lenders and store assets somewhere else entirely. Behind the scenes, each layer extracts value and charges users (even though services appear “free”) through fees, spreads, settlement delays and execution costs. 

Credit card networks take a percentage of every purchase. Brokerage platforms advertise commission-free trading while monetizing customer order flow behind the scenes. Banks profit from deposit spreads while offering customers minimal yield. Settlement between institutions can still take days, tying up liquidity across markets.

Mastercard’s business exists because of those silos. They connect banks, merchants and consumers across fragmented systems, and take a fee at every step.

These structures persist not because they are necessary, but because they have been profitable.

Blockchain infrastructure changes that.

When money, securities and collateral move on shared digital rails, entire layers of reconciliation and settlement complexity can disappear. Payments, investing, lending and asset management no longer need to operate as separate businesses. They can become integrated features of unified financial platforms. In that world, shifting from cash into government bonds or stocks becomes a near instant digital exchange rather than a multiday process involving brokers, custodians and clearinghouses.

That convergence has already begun. BlackRock’s expansion into tokenized funds reflects a recognition that assets themselves will move across interoperable rails, where currency and collateral operate within the same system rather than across fragmented intermediaries.

At the same time, systems like JPMorgan’s Kinexys show how money itself is beginning to move on those same rails, enabling real-time payments, liquidity transfers and settlement within a single infrastructure layer.

The BVNK acquisition points to something larger than crypto adoption. It shows that even the companies that built the existing financial rails now expect those rails to evolve or be replaced. Additionally, some analysts now believe AI-driven agents will route payments through stablecoins by default, selecting the cheapest and fastest rails automatically without regard for legacy networks, accelerating adoption even further. 

Many incumbent institutions have legitimate concerns about stability, compliance and consumer protection. Financial infrastructure requires trust. Yet it is also true that parts of the industry have strong incentives to slow structural change. Banks benefit from low-cost deposits and spreads that could shrink in a world where digital dollars move more freely. Payment networks have built lucrative businesses around interchange fees that lower-cost settlement rails could compress. Brokerage models rely on execution and order-flow economics that become harder to sustain in markets operating continuously on shared infrastructure.

The legislative debate around crypto that has stalled in Congress illustrates this tension. Some of this debate is about risk and consumer protection, but a key underlying issue is whether digital dollars should be allowed to provide users yield directly. Banks rely on low-cost deposits and earn by investing that money while customers receive little interest in return. If stablecoin providers can offer dollar-backed assets that move freely across digital networks and also pay competitive yields, deposits could migrate away from traditional banks.

Mastercard’s move isn’t a bet on crypto hype. It’s a hedge against irrelevance. The news suggests that the companies that defined the last era of finance are now preparing for a system where value moves more quickly, cheaply and across shared infrastructure.

Industries rarely disappear overnight, but they can and they do evolve. Banks, brokerages and payment firms still possess enormous advantages in customer trust, regulatory expertise and distribution. The question is whether they transform quickly enough to remain central to the financial system, or end up on the outside looking in.