How big is the treasury services market? A $50 billion breakdown

Four banks earn over $50 billion in annual treasury and trade services revenue: Citi at $15.4 billion, JPMorgan at $19.4 billion, BNY at $7.0 billion, and HSBC at $8.5 billion. These four institutions clear the bulk of currency payments, hold the segregated balances for asset managers and brokers, and operate the FX infrastructure that the rest of finance depends on. Together they form the largest, most concentrated, and least disrupted infrastructure layer in financial services.

Who runs the treasury services market

Four divisions dominate the 2025 revenue tables:

• JPMorgan Payments. $19.4 billion. Combines treasury services, trade finance, and merchant services into the largest TTS revenue line.
• Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions. $15.4 billion. The largest standalone TTS franchise in banking.
• HSBC Global Payments Solutions. $8.5 billion. The leading European correspondent franchise across Asia, Middle East, and Latin America corridors.
• BNY Treasury Services. $7.0 billion. Anchored by the largest custodial deposit base in the world.

These four divisions together cleared more than $50 billion in 2025 revenue on infrastructure that has not been materially redesigned in decades. The franchise is concentrated at the very top of the global banking system. Below these four, no other institution clears anywhere near this revenue on treasury services as a standalone line of business.

Other banks participate. Deutsche Bank, Standard Chartered, BNP Paribas, and Bank of America all run meaningful TTS operations. But the four named above dominate the global infrastructure layer for clearing, custody, and FX serving financial institutions. They are the rails that the rest of the system runs on.

How treasury services generate $50 billion

Treasury services revenue comes from three streams:

1. Transaction fees on payments, FX, and securities movement. When a corporate client wires funds across borders, the bank earns a basis point fee on the value, plus an FX margin on the conversion.
2. Float income on the deposits sitting in custody and operating accounts. Even at thin spreads, the absolute volumes mean billions in net interest margin.
3. Fees on managed balances: cash management products, money market sweeps, and treasury bill custody.

This is the economics of correspondent banking at scale. Citi alone is the dollar clearer for thousands of other banks worldwide. Each of those banks holds a nostro account at Citi. The flow of payments through those nostro accounts generates a steady annuity of fees, FX margins, and float income that compounds because the relationship is sticky.

The model has been remarkably durable. The Bank for International Settlements documented a 30% decline in active correspondent banking relationships between 2011 and 2022, but the revenue concentrated at the top has grown rather than shrunk. The relationships that remain are the largest, most lucrative ones. Mid-market FIs that previously held direct correspondent accounts have been pushed down into nested arrangements that pay tolls to the same handful of institutions.

Manual, siloed, and expensive to run

The infrastructure that generates this $50 billion is outdated. Internal systems at the largest treasury services banks are typically a patchwork of mainframes, batch processing engines, and point-to-point messaging systems built up over multiple decades. Operations teams handle exceptions, breaks, and reconciliations manually. Onboarding a new correspondent client can take six to nine months. Onboarding a new product line can take years.

This is not a secret. The banks themselves describe their TTS operations as legacy infrastructure undergoing slow modernisation. Industry research from McKinsey and Oliver Wyman consistently identifies operational efficiency and technology debt as the dominant strategic challenge for the incumbents.

The cost-to-serve at the top is high. Each transaction processed through correspondent rails passes through multiple banks, each adding fees, FX margins, and operational delays. The end client experiences this as days of settlement uncertainty and embedded costs they cannot see. The bank experiences it as a thick layer of operational overhead that limits margins despite the franchise scale.

Why mid-market FIs are gated out

The $50 billion revenue figure is concentrated because the franchise is gated. Direct correspondent banking access at Citi or JPMorgan is reserved for the largest financial institutions: G-SIBs, top-tier asset managers, sovereign and supranational clients. Mid-market financial institutions, including regional banks, PSPs, payroll platforms, marketplaces, and brokers, do not get direct relationships. They get nested arrangements at smaller banks that hold their own correspondent relationships with the top tier.

This is the source of the cost. A mid-market PSP that needs to clear in USD operates two or three banks removed from Citi. Each layer between the PSP and the underlying clearing rail charges a margin. Each layer adds operational latency. Each layer introduces counterparty risk. The PSP pays the toll multiple times and gets the slowest settlement on the curve.

For platforms scaling internationally, the gating becomes a strategic constraint. Adding a new currency corridor requires finding a new chain of correspondents. Adding a new product, whether custody, FX, or cash management, requires duplicate infrastructure across each currency. The largest banks built this gating intentionally over decades, and it is the reason the $50 billion stays concentrated at the top.

The opportunity for specialist infrastructure

The structural shift is that mid-market FIs no longer need a systemically important bank to access treasury services. A specialist correspondent institution can hold direct membership of clearing rails, operate named account custody for client funds, and execute FX at wholesale rates, all without operating a lending book, retail franchise, or investment bank. The single counterparty model that the four incumbents have built can be reproduced for mid-market clients without the layered cost structure.

This is the model behind Lorum. The institution is structured around clearing, custody, and cash management as its sole business, with 100% reserves and no lending exposure. The flows that the four incumbents earn $50 billion on, from FIs they cannot economically serve, are exactly the flows a specialist correspondent is built to handle.

The $50 billion will not disappear. The incumbents will continue to serve their largest clients on infrastructure that prints money for the franchise. But the next decade of treasury services growth sits with mid-market FIs that the incumbents have priced out, and that requires a different infrastructure layer. The size of the market is no longer the question. The question is what fraction of it can be reached without the layered gating that the four incumbents have spent decades building.

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