Citigroup Sees 84% Jump in Fees From M&A Deals

Last year saw merger and acquisition (M&A) deals climb to an almost record high.

That, in turn, led to record revenues for Citigroup, according to fourth-quarter 2025 earnings results reported by the bank Wednesday (Jan. 14).

Citi saw an 84% jump in advisory fees during the quarter, ending a year in which its revenues for helping guide M&A deals hit an all-time high.

“With record revenues and positive operating leverage for each of our five businesses, 2025 was a year of significant progress as we demonstrated that the investments we are making are driving strong top-line growth,” CEO Jane Fraser said in a Wednesday press release.

Larger competitor JPMorgan Chase saw M&A up just 6% for 2025, Bloomberg reported Wednesday, adding that Citi and other Wall Street banks are facing increased competition in the dealmaking space from “boutique advisers” like Evercore and PJT Partners.

By the closing weeks of 2025, there had been a record 70 deals, each worth more than $10 billion, making it the second-biggest year on record. The first was 2021, when low interest rates and COVID stimulus money helped drive over $6 trillion in M&A deals.

“M&A today is all about the mega deals, the race for scale,” Anu Aiyengar, JPMorgan’s head of advisory and M&A, told Reuters in December. “Large caps have clearly outperformed small caps. And you’ve seen that also in the M&A market.”

Meanwhile, Citi’s earnings results also demonstrated “how transaction banking can shift from being a balance sheet-intensive utility to a technology-enabled services platform with improving economics,” PYMNTS reported Wednesday.

Transaction banking is gaining strategic weight as its cost structure changes. While the economies of scale in payments and cash management were for decades held back by legacy systems and manual processes, modernization efforts have begun to alter that equation.

“Citi’s multiyear investment in data platforms, controls and application rationalization reached a critical mass in 2025,” the report said. “More than 80% of its transformation programs are now at or near their targeted end state, and hundreds of legacy applications have been retired.”

These efforts lowered operational risk, but they also reduced marginal costs in high-volume businesses like the bank’s Treasury and Trade Solutions division.