Head of financials & fintech research @CitizensBank. 20+ years covering financials & fintech stocks. Dad of 3. Long innovation, short free time. Go Irish 🍀

New York, NY
This was a fun one👇👇
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Big day in the market for $HOOD. A lot of good discussion out there around the accelerating momentum on their own blockchain - and people are starting to wake up to the broader opportunity around to Tokenization. If you didn’t catch my recent conversation on @RobinhoodApp with @hood__house, I walk-through why I’m so bullish on the opportunity from tokenization, which will be amplified by agentic finance (“Tokenization unlocks trapped capital” at the 30 minute mark). 👇👇👇
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Devin Ryan retweeted
🚨 CITIZENS BANK'S @devinpryan ON THE REGULATORY SHIFT MOST PEOPLE ARE MISSING: "With Project Crypto, the SEC and CFTC are working closely together. For the first time really ever, and I've covered financials for over 20 years. The heads of both agencies worked together many years ago. There's a collaboration happening that we haven't ever seen before." On what that means for crypto regardless of legislation: "I'm really constructive that if we don't get the legislation, the regulators are gonna come in behind and close the gaps that are necessary to get to these next phases of adoption."
CoinDesk
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Devin Ryan retweeted
🎥 @CitizenBanks’ @devinpryan says don’t judge @Securitize by its latest earnings. Judge it by whether you believe global finance is moving on-chain, and if it is, today’s $38 billion tokenized asset market is barely the starting line.
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Talking $SECZ earnings and stock move, what could support a recovery in crypto trading volume, importance of regulatory clarity, and why asset managers are pushing for Tokenization. @JennSanasie 👇👇
“How many assets can get brought on-chain? We think it could be tens of trillions.” @CitizensBank's @devinpryan calls Securitize's post-earnings selloff an overreaction and stands by his $15 target. @PanteraCapital's @cosmo_jiang reveals why Bitcoin was left out of the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index. And, @RobinhoodApp CFO @ShivVerma on opening early-stage investing to retail investors. Watch Public Keys from the @NYSE with @JennSanasie: Chapters/Timecodes: 00:00 Welcome to Public Keys 00:29 Securitize Stumbles in First Public Earnings Report 00:50 Citizens' Devin Ryan Joins Public Keys 02:07 From Speculation to Real Blockchain Usage 03:52 Securitize's 26% Selloff and a $15 Price Target 05:29 The Bull and Bear Case for SECZ 06:47 Will the SEC and CFTC Fill the Regulatory Gap? 09:58 What to Watch: BlackRock and Tokenized AUM 12:18 Bitcoin ETFs Post $390M in Weekly Outflows 12:46 13F Filings: Harvard Holds, JPMorgan and Tudor Add 13:06 Ethereum ETFs Snap Five-Week Inflow Streak 13:42 Pantera's Cosmo Jiang on the Market Outlook 16:59 Bitcoin's 42% Discount vs. AI Stocks' Premium 18:26 Blockchain and the Agentic Economy 20:17 Why Solana Leads on AI Agent Activity 21:15 Inside the S&P Pantera Digital Asset Index 25:07 Robinhood Ventures Fund II Debuts on NYSE 26:03 The Risk and Reward of Early-Stage Investing 28:32 How Daily Liquidity for Private Assets Works 30:38 Robinhood Chain, Tokenization and Yield 32:48 Crypto Fear & Greed Index at 31
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Earnings season kicks off tomorrow with 5 out of the 6 largest banks reporting. Consensus is reflecting ~25% YoY EPS growth on average, closer to 40% for GS & MS. These have also been some of the best performing stocks in financials, the bar is quite high … but the themes should set a positive tone across financials & fintech.
"I think the bar is quite high for this group," says Citizens' Devin Ryan ahead of bank earnings. cnb.cx/4phNtbi
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Sec lending and pledged-asset borrowing aren’t the flashiest corners of market structure, but they could see some of the biggest impact from tokenization. Moving collateral onchain at scale should lower the cost of capital across the economy. Big deal for capital markets and potentially the broader economy given the multiplier on unlocked capital.
Very good post by Stani on what is coming to revolutionize securities lending markets with tokenization!!
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The IPO summer is here. Retail brokers are participating in a bigger way in the recent wave, where the business multipliers expand well beyond the deal distribution opportunity. Of course I still had to bring it back to agentic trading! $SOFI $HOOD $SCHW $COIN $ETOR $SPCX
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Some additional food for thought on @SpaceX IPO knock-on effects, particularly for the retail brokers that participated. The selling fee itself is a relatively modest event, but the more interesting areas to watch are the multipliers. Several examples: 1. Trading volume. More than 500 million shares and over $80B of dollar volume changed hands today. For perspective, that’s nearly 4x Facebook’s first day in dollar terms and well above the daily dollar volume of even the most actively traded stocks, including NVDA. Approximately the entire IPO allocation turned over in a single session. That activity flows through the brokers, and options haven’t even listed yet, where the economics are meaningfully better than equities. 2. Securities lending. Has been a light / disappointing revenue line for the retail brokers lately because capital markets have been quiet (4Q25 government shutdown and 1Q26 geopolitical disruption), and thus, hard-to-borrows disappeared - which drive Sec lending. In 3Q of last year, Sec lending was running in the mid-teens as a percentage of Robinhood’s revenue, and it fell by about half to start this year. Even that 3Q level was far from peak, in our view. SpaceX changes the trajectory, potentially dramatically. A small float on a ~$2T company with heavy short, hedging, and index-arb demand is what creates rich borrow spreads. Don’t think most people are calibrating for this (or implications on Sec lending of other large IPOs that could potentially follow). 3. Margin balances. Should build as investors finance positions, and the cash that came in chasing allocations sits in sweep earning a spread. Much of it stays on the platform even if the allocations don’t fill - and again if there are more large IPOs coming, that cash could continue to sit there waiting. 4. Access itself gathers assets. Keep an eye on brokerage and prediction markets apps moving up in the App Store, today was a good day. New funded accounts and money that showed up for this deal, and the IPOs behind it, tend to stick around and monetize for years at essentially no acquisition cost. It also separates the platforms that had a seat from those that didn’t, and we expect issuers to keep wanting retail in the book from here. The bigger unlock is whether this gets the equity capital markets engine going again. The $500M+ in fees here equals roughly 3% of the entire ECM fee pool from 2025, from a single deal. And for perspective on the cycle, the 2021 peak for equity underwriting fees ran at nearly twice the pace of early 2026. The engine is fragile but looks to just be restarting - doesn’t jive with calls of “peak” capital markets cycle…the pipeline is at a record level in both size and quality in our view. Many companies were watching today closely, and a positive reception in the coming weeks could pull it forward. As always, trading performance will be a critical factor in what comes next and when. On that point, the market has been selective but I would point out that the top 10 largest IPOs YTD are up on average about 25%…$SPCX added another positive datapoint today.
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SpaceX day. 🚀 Quite the experience to be at the Nasdaq MarketSite this morning for the largest IPO ever priced! Thanks to @SquawkCNBC for having me on to discuss the implications for the banks, retail brokers, and the broader capital markets ecosystem. A historic fee event, but potential second-order impacts are an even bigger deal. $GS $MS $HOOD $SCHW $SOFI
Wall Street underwriters are in line for paydays tied to the SpaceX IPO. Citizens Analyst Devin Ryan weighs in. cnb.cx/4vhtRq7
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The @SpaceX IPO, the largest and arguably most consequential ever, priced tonight. I’ll be on CNBC’s Squawk Box tomorrow morning at 8:20 a.m. ET to discuss some of the direct and second-order effects of the transaction for participating investment banks ( $GS $MS $JPM and others) and retail brokers ( $HOOD $SOFI $SCHW) that could extend well beyond the underwriting fees generated by the deal. Tune in 🚀
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Devin Ryan retweeted
"We're moving to the next phase, the agentic finance economy." @devinpryan of @CitizensBank tells @RemyBlaireNews that agentic trading could drive 10 to 20 times more volume than today, with names like $HOOD already moving in that direction, and "really none of that is in models right now."
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With more “agentic finance” headlines in recent days, just a reminder that the impact on trading volumes likely won’t be linear if/when adoption scales. Same holds for other financial services like payments (stablecoins), or micro lending & borrowing - not to mention the innovation we expect to come from an infrastructure with effectively no time or transaction size constraints. The versions being launched today are just 1.0, and most aren’t directed towards the “average” or novice customer - that will evolve materially over the next 12 months. For context, leading retail brokerage platforms like $HOOD or $SCHW see about 3 trades per customer per month on average, but that number is skewed by a small number of highly active traders. The majority of customers are likely transacting 0-1x per month, not because they don’t care about their financial position, but because they don’t have the time or expertise to execute more sophisticated strategies, even those I would put in the basic investment principles bucket. Asking agents to employ strategies like direct indexing, active tax-loss harvesting, real-time rebalancing, and basic options overlays changes the calculus entirely. Our work, looking at both robo-advisory platform data and early anecdotes from agentic offerings already in market, suggests average accounts could transact 10x or more than they do today. Adoption will follow outcomes, so that’s critical to track, but I think this progresses to a win-win for customers and the industry, Most importantly, I still don’t think the order of magnitude is widely appreciated or even close to modeled if adoption takes off - and this isn’t years away.
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With the CLARITY Act seemingly on the doorstep, one of the next major questions I think still needs to be tackled is the tax treatment on crypto “utility” transactions. In traditional commodities, an airline consuming appreciated oil doesn’t recognize a taxable gain whereas a person using appreciated crypto to buy a cup of coffee does at the moment of consumption. Tokens like ETH aren’t just investment assets - they’re the fuel (commodity) powering blockchain networks. Yet, because the IRS currently treats tokens as property, using ETH for its intended utility - like paying gas fees or transferring assets on-chain - can itself create a taxable event if the token appreciated. If blockchains are going to become foundational infrastructure for financial services and other industries - and I think agentic activity ultimately becomes another huge multiplier to this - tracking every interaction as a taxable “trade” becomes extremely burdensome and increasingly misaligned with the underlying economic activity. For large sophisticated institutions, the tax complexity is probably manageable, even if inconsistent. For deeper consumer adoption - buying that coffee or sending money to a family member - it creates friction. Over time, I expect much of this complexity will be abstracted away as companies and wallets deal with the gas fees for customers - nonetheless, it adds complication and therefore slows adoption. That doesn’t mean crypto shouldn’t be taxed, but the distinction between financial speculation and utility consumption seems critical here. De minimis exemptions and transaction thresholds address this directly, and the good news is there is some positive movement, including bipartisan proposals in Congress with White House backing and favorable JCT scoring. So, a lot to be enthusiastic about, but addressing these remaining inconsistencies would go a long way toward cementing U.S. leadership in crypto and blockchain innovation - and allowing the technology to scale to its potential. $CRCL $COIN $HOOD $GLXY $SOFI $ETOR
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Recency bias is difficult to escape in modeling & dangerous in investing. $COIN back-to-back losses reflect a tough backdrop, not the future story of TradFi adoption of stablecoins/tokenization or the “massive” multiplier from agentic payments & trading. finance.yahoo.com/video/agen…
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Pattern Day Trader (PDT) rule repeal = more freedom for retail investors in modern markets. But the bigger story might be the connection to the coming wave of agentic investing solutions, which I think is about to ignite a multiplier on retail trading activity. You can’t have agents operating in brokerage accounts - rebalancing, hedging, tax loss harvesting - if it gets shut down after 3 trades. The shift to a risk-based system is better aligned with that future. Regardless, bullish for retail trading volume.
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