Welcome to Industry Focus, the podcast that dives into a different sector of the stock market every day.

It's Monday, June 25th, and this is the financial show.

We're kicking off a very special theme week. This week marks the immediate lead up to the

Motley Fool's 25th anniversary, which is Saturday, June 30th. So we decided to celebrate

by doing a theme week around the concept of 25 years.

Because Motley is in the name, everyone's interpreting that a little bit differently.

Some episodes may be talking about how things were in their covered industry 25 years ago here on industry

focus. Others will probably be predicting how things might be 25 years into the future

with the caveat that well no one can really predict the future now can they.

Matt and I are overachievers so we well no one can really predict the future now can they.

Matt and I are overachievers so we decided to do both

in under 25 minutes so get your timers out folks

because things are about to get interesting.

So Matt let's let's's start by going to the past and some of the

kind of major changes we've seen in the banking industry over the past 25 years

one of the big ones that we were talking about before we hopped on air today of course

consolidation. Yeah definitely one of the big things that's happened over the past

25 years is that the big banks have gotten bigger. We now have what are known as the big four banks in the US, Citigroup Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and J.P. Morgan Chase. And all of those have grown substantially through acquisitions

not just from the financial crisis which saw a lot of consolidation but

beforehand actually two of the or three of the four actually were acquired themselves and the acquiring companies just

decided to keep the names because they were more recognizable. But just to kind of name a couple of cases, Wells Fargo picked up Wachovia along the way.

J.P. Morgan Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual.

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