Public Bank Screen: November TBVPS & Valuations Largest Public Banks

People love to make bank investing sound complicated. They bury it in jargon, acronyms, and metrics that frankly sound made up. But the essence of banking hasn’t changed in centuries. Take deposits. Lend prudently. Earn a spread. Keep your customers’ trust. Protect your capital. And if you repeat long enough, you win. In the process you will slowly but surely grow your net income, and if you are not dividending all of it out, growing your tangible book value. The North Star of metrics in all of banking.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Jamie Dimon, arguably the greatest operator in the space:

“Our tangible book value per share is a good, very conservative measure of shareholder value. If your assets and liabilities are properly valued, if your accounting is appropriately conservative, if you have real earnings without taking excessive risk and if you have strong franchises with defensible margins, tangible book value should be a very conservative measure of value.”

Dimon goes on to argue in his 2011 shareholder letter that yes there are intangibles (like brand value or goodwill), but at it’s core if you’re growing book value that is the most important thing.

But a funny thing happens in banking, when you pull up a ticker of your favorite stock you’re looking at market cap or market value.

It’s time to point out that market value, is actually the less conservative measure of shareholder value. Why? Because it includes human judgment, an opinion on what multiple your book value or earnings deserve. Book value is closer to fact. It’s the number squarely under your control. Credit cycles, rates, and politics will always shift, but how you manage those forces to grow tangible book value (TBV) is entirely on you.

The best CEOs in banking not only understand this, but embrace this. They focus relentlessly on compounding tangible book value per share (TBVPS) through every cycle. In doing so, they unlock a double benefit: not just steady growth in intrinsic value, but higher market multiples as investors recognize the consistency. The TBVPS compounders become magnets for capital, delivering the kind of shareholder returns everyone chases but few sustain. Ask any great bank investor out there and they will likely flock intuitively to the people with long track records of compounding TBVPS.

And to save you the energy and effort, below are the top TBVPS growers across the public bank universe over the past 7 years, along with their current P/TBV ratios, so you can spot which elite compounders still trade cheaply. You’ll also see the laggards, for anyone who prefers to bet against mediocrity. For any bank investor, this is the “integrity check” on if your stock (or management team) is able to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

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Some commentary on a few themes within the screen is here: