Ally Love, Dwyane Wade, JPMorgan Wealth Management CEO Kristen Lemkau, Tom Brady, A’ja Wilson and Megan Rapinoe during the JPMorganChase Athlete Council meeting on March 18, 2026.

Shawn McMillan | CNBC

JPMorgan Chase has recruited some of the biggest names in American sports to help tackle a persistent problem: professional athletes going broke.

The bank on Wednesday announced an initiative called the JPMorgan Chase Athlete Council, led by two-time NBA Hall of Famer Dwyane Wade and featuring other high-profile athletes, including Tom Brady, Sue Bird, Alex Morgan, Megan Rapinoe, A’ja Wilson and Jalen Brunson.

The stars will meet with JPMorgan executives to help the bank craft programs designed to serve athletes from college to professional life and retirement, JPMorgan said in a release.

The move reflects growing competition among banks and wealth managers to serve athletes, the most prominent of whom are increasingly becoming entrepreneurs, investors and media personalities.

Most athletes don’t receive personal finance education in school, and their relatively short careers leave a narrow earning window that requires careful planning, according to JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets. About one in six NFL players declare bankruptcy within 12 years of retiring, the bank said.

“We heard a lot of the same thing over and over again, which is a lot of young athletes coming into money very suddenly, they develop unsustainable lifestyles, they don’t always get great advice around them, and those are the lucky ones,” Kristin Lemkau, head of JPMorgan Wealth Management, told CNBC’s Leslie Picker on Wednesday.

Wade said in the release that the initiative gives athletes a chance to share hard-won experiences with the next generation.

“Having the right educational resources and guidance is critical to making smart decisions about money as your career evolves,” he said.

Tom Brady, A’ja Wilson and Megan Rapinoe during the JPMorganChase Athlete Council meeting on March 18, 2026.

Shawn McMillan | CNBC

WNBA player Wilson said it’s important to her to be able to share money management skills with the next cohort of professional athletes.

“We’re starting to try to turn the page and help the youth in the next generation understand that you have to build trust, you have to build boundaries and know exactly how you want to operate with your money,” Wilson told CNBC.

The bank is also standing up an Athlete Center of Excellence staffed by financial professionals with sports experience and launching a content hub with checklists for athletes navigating the name, image and likeness, or NIL, system and guides for assembling a roster of advisors.

— CNBC’s Laya Neelakandan contributed to this report.

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People line up outside of the shuttered Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) headquarters on March 10, 2023 in Santa Clara, California.

Justin Sullivan | Getty Images

Three years ago, JPMorgan Chase executive Doug Petno was at a New York City party celebrating a colleague’s retirement when his boss, Jamie Dimon, called Petno over.

It was March 9, 2023, and the customers of a West Coast lender known for catering to startups had been withdrawing deposits in droves.

“Jamie looks at me and says, ‘Get on this call,'” Petno told CNBC this week in an exclusive interview.

On the line were regulators with an urgent question: Was JPMorgan interested in buying Silicon Valley Bank?

California’s finance regulators seized SVB the next day, completing the sudden collapse of an institution at the heart of the American startup community. Over that weekend, Dimon, Petno and other JPMorgan leaders repeatedly weighed whether they should purchase the bank, which had just lost $42 billion in deposits. They decided against it, in part because thousands of SVB clients were signing up for JPMorgan accounts, anyway, in a flight to safety.

“We had three years’ worth of incoming clients in a weekend,” said Petno, who is co-head of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank. “Onboarding teams were opening up accounts around the clock.”

Emboldened by what they were seeing, Petno had an idea: What if JPMorgan could build a true competitor to SVB — as well as startups Brex, Ramp and Mercury — all of whom had carved a profitable niche serving founders and venture capital investors?

“We went to our board and said, ‘there’s a vacuum in the market,'” Petno told CNBC. “At that very moment, everybody saw the opportunity.”

Keeping tabs

For JPMorgan, already a giant in Main Street and Wall Street finance, winning the more specific niche of startup banking from West Coast rivals is about more than gaining deposits. It’s both a key element of the growth strategy for a bank with more than $180 billion in revenue last year, and also a means to help the New York-based lender stay close to technology developments for itself.

JPMorgan, with a tech budget of nearly $20 billion this year, is aiming to not only serve startup clients and VC investors better, but to learn from them. The firm keeps a close eye on Silicon Valley startups for solutions to problems the bank itself faces, from cybersecurity to quantum computing.

In fact, when a JPMorgan client announces a round of artificial intelligence-related cutbacks to jobs and expenses, the firm will often send a team of bankers to investigate how the client is doing it, said Petno.

Typically, the bankers find that implementing new AI agents is only a fraction of the reason for layoffs, while other factors like over-hiring and inefficient processes account for the rest, he said.

Co-CEOs of Commercial & Investment Bank at JPMorganChase, Troy Rohrbaugh and Douglas Petno.

Courtesy: JPMorganChase

JPMorgan began its startup banking business in 2016 as it became aware of its tech-focused rivals during its westward expansion. In the beginning, it only served bigger, more mature startups.

That’s in part because the bank didn’t yet have a digital banking solution that younger founders in particular craved, Petno said. It also didn’t have enough investment bankers at the time to target smaller, riskier startups.

For years, the view on JPMorgan from some in the VC community was that it took too long to open an account, or that resolving issues around payments involved dealing with time-consuming visits to a branch, investors told CNBC.

“They want to go to the website to open an account, and if it’s more than 15 minutes, they’re done,” says Petno.

But in the weeks that followed the SVB collapse, Petno and his team moved quickly, hiring a few key players from SVB, including then-SVB Capital President John China, who today leads JPMorgan’s innovation economy business along with Andrew Kresse.  

By late April of 2023, JPMorgan found itself looking at buying another wounded California-based bank. This time, it made the winning bid for First Republic, which also catered to the tech community.

With fresh learnings from SVB and the banking operations of First Republic, JPMorgan doubled its revenue from startup banking in 2023, according to the company.

Despite the digital banking focus, a startup founder will still sometimes walk into a Chase branch to deposit a huge funding check into a regular account. Now, when that happens, JPMorgan’s systems immediately gets that client moved to the startup team, Petno says.

Killer app?

JPMorgan has now quadrupled the number of total clients it has in the business to nearly 12,000, served by 550 bankers on both coasts, according to the lender, all of whom draw resources from different parts of the company.

Founders and VC investors are clients of the private bank, while the startups are covered by the commercial bank and VC funds are separate clients in a business largely acquired from First Republic.

While JPMorgan declined to give specific revenue figures, Petno said the startup business had a “dramatically higher” growth rate than the bank’s main business lines.

And yet, Petno still isn’t satisfied with the firm’s digital banking offerings for startups, describing a project underway that will help them leapfrog competitors.

Besides SVB, which is now owned by First Citizens Bank, and the startups Mercury and Ramp, competitors in the space include Stifel and Customers Bank. In January, Capital One acquired Brex for $5.15 billion.

Since most startups fail, JPMorgan identifies companies that it expects to be winning bets, seeking to develop relationships with them earlier in their life cycle, like SVB did.

That way, it can provide not only core bank accounts, but lucrative investment banking advice along the way.

JPMorgan’s ultimate vision is to become the one-stop shop for founders, serving all their needs, including international expansion, from the seed round to initial public offering and beyond.

“Once you’re onboarded, you can never outgrow JPMorgan, from unicorn all the way to a Magnificent 7,” Petno said.

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An Obamacare sign is displayed outside an insurance agency on Nov. 12, 2025 in Miami, Florida.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

With enhanced Obamacare tax credits set to expire at the end of the year, Republicans are proposing new alternatives aimed at lowering the cost of health care.

Their window for doing so is rapidly closing — and leaving middle-class Americans uncertain in the balance.

The White House is expected to make an announcement this week addressing efforts to either renew or replace the Affordable Care Act enhanced premium tax credits, according to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

“We believe health care’s going to come down,” Bessent said during an interview on Sunday’s “Meet the Press.” “We will see an announcement this coming week on that.”

The news could not come soon enough for Shana Verstegen and her husband. The couple buys insurance through the ACA exchange and is facing a 50% premium increase for their family plan in 2026 if the enhanced tax credits are not renewed by Congress.

“We have been looking at our expenses, and it’s tough now because everything’s really expensive already,” with little room to cut costs,” said Verstegen, a fitness instructor from Madison, Wisconsin. “We’re looking at a few activities our kids do and things like that.”

Verstegen traveled to Washington during the government shutdown to advocate for extending financial support for middle-class ACA enrollees like her family. Since the government reopened, she’s been watching the discussions on Capitol Hill around so-called Obamacare tax credits warily.

“I’m thrilled that lawmakers are finally at the table and talking about ways to make health care more affordable. What I’m frustrated about is there is less than a month to do something,” she said.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., promised Democrats the chamber would vote on extending the enhanced tax credits in mid-December as part of a deal to end a record-long government shutdown.

Dec. 15 is the deadline for the majority of Americans to sign up for 2026 ACA coverage, and as Congress headed home for the Thanksgiving recess, there was no consensus on Obamacare credit funding or what those subsidies would look like.  

GOP proposes cash payments

Some Republicans in the House signed a bipartisan letter urging Senate leadership to have negotiations that include members from both chambers to find a way to extend the enhanced tax credits for a year. 

The subsidies, enacted during the Covid pandemic, provide aid for middle-class enrollees by capping their portion of premium payments at 8.5% of income. 

The cost of extending the tax credits is more than $30 billion per year, according to the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office.

President Donald Trump has opposed an extension of the Obamacare tax credits that he says fund the “money sucking” insurance industry, stating in a post on his Truth Social platform, “The only healthcare I will support or approve is sending the money directly back to the people.” 

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., has introduced a bill that would give ACA enrollees cash through a Health Savings Account called a Trump Health Freedom Account, which they could use to pay for both premiums and health expenses. According to the bill, the payments would be effective starting Jan. 1.

The current ACA subsidies are based on mid-tier Silver plans as the benchmark coverage option. Those plans have an average deductible of just over $5,000, according to health policy organization KFF.

Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., has proposed making the lower-tier Bronze plan the benchmark for enhanced subsidies, while providing cash to offset the higher Bronze plan deductible. According to KFF, Bronze plan deductibles average more than $7,000.

Cassidy told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Monday his proposal would provide subsidies for the lower-tier plan, limiting out-of-pocket premium costs at levels similar to those under a Biden-era proposal.

“But we’re using a cheaper policy so it’s easier to do,” he explained. “That gives us savings to put into a Health Savings Account.”

Trading down from a benchmark Silver plan to a Bronze plan without the enhanced tax credits would not save enrollees much money.

A 60-year-old couple in Florida earning $86,000, for example, would qualify for a $0 premium on a 2026 Bronze plan with an enhanced tax credit, according to a premium calculator from KFF. Without the credit, the same plan would cost $2,169 per month, or more than $26,000 per year. 

Racing the clock

With Congress out for the Thanksgiving recess, there is less than a month left of the legislative calendar.

Getting an HSA funding measure not only passed but implemented for the start of coverage next year may not be possible, according to Sabrina Corlette, co-director of the Center on Health Insurance Reforms at Georgetown University.

“Conceptually, what they’re talking about is a radical restructuring of how the ACA marketplaces and tax credits work, and we literally are days away from when people have to pay their January premiums in order to effectuate their coverage,” Corlette said.

Oscar Health CEO Mark Bertolini said a national plan in which the government or employers give consumers cash to buy their own coverage in the marketplace is something he supports in the long run, but extending the enhanced tax credits makes the most sense now.

“I think that’s how they’re going to solve this problem, so they get past the midterms, and they have time to put together a fulsome plan,” Bertolini said.

Enrollees face Dec. 15 deadline

Regardless of whether the tax credits are extended, the deadline to sign up for 2026 coverage remains firm for now. For those enrolling on the healthcare.gov exchange, it is just three weeks away. On some state-run exchanges such as those for California and Massachusetts, the deadline is Jan. 31.

Obamacare premiums for 2026 have spiked as insurers expect some enrollees to drop of out of the market, in part because of the uncertainty over the extension of the enhanced premium tax credits.

Oscar Health has been working with insurance brokers to reach out to its members about more affordable plans.

“We believed, out of the people affected by enhanced subsidies, that we could sell to 85% of them. And right now, what we’re seeing says maybe more,” said Bertolini.

KFF’s executive vice president for health policy, Larry Levitt, said enrollees should consider signing up by the Dec. 15 deadline even if Congress does not manage to pass a premium relief measure before the end of the year, because the Trump administration has tightened rules for signing up outside of open enrollment.

“The premiums are still month-to-month, so you’re committing to one month’s premium. If it’s unaffordable, you can always drop out, but you can’t come back in if you don’t sign up,” Levitt said.

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Signage is displayed outside the Sinclair Broadcast Group Inc. headquarters in Cockeysville, Maryland, U.S.

Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Sinclair disclosed a stake in fellow broadcast station owner E.W. Scripps on Monday, in a move to push toward a merger of the companies.

Sinclair, which acquired a roughly 8% position in Scripps per the filing, recently launched a strategic review of its own business that could result in a tie-up. Scripps, for its part, has seen its struggles mount in the competitive industry and is among the smallest of its peers.

In the filing, Sinclair said it has been engaged in “constructive” discussions regarding a deal and believes that, if it were to reach an agreement, a transaction could be completed within nine to 12 months.

Sinclair said in the filing that based on trading multiples, there would be an expected $300 million in synergies if a merger were to take place.

Scripps’ stock rose 40% on Monday while Sinclair’s stock gained almost 5%.

Sinclair, which acquired the stake for about $15.6 million, declined to comment beyond the SEC filing.

In a statement on Monday, Scripps said its board “will take all steps appropriate to protect the company and the company’s shareholders from the opportunistic actions of Sinclair or anyone else.”

“Scripps’ board of directors and management are focused on driving value for all of the company’s shareholders through the continued execution of its strategic plan,” the company said in its statement. “The board and management are aligned on doing only what is in the best interest of all of the company’s shareholders as well as its employees and the many communities and audiences it serves across the United States.”

The statement added that the board continues to evaluate “any transactions and other alternatives that would enhance the value of the company and would be in the best interest of all company shareholders.”

Broadcast TV station group owners have suffered like the rest of media companies in recent years due to the shift away from the traditional pay-TV bundles and toward streaming. These broadcast stations, for the most part, make the majority of their money from so-called retransmission fees, which are paid on a per-subscriber rate by traditional TV distributors.

Broadcast station owners like Sinclair have been eager to do mergers as they push for deregulation under the Trump administration.

In August, Nexstar Media Group, the biggest owner of these stations, agreed to acquire Tegna for $3.54 billion.

Sinclair, meanwhile, is also considering spinning off or splitting its ventures unit, which includes pay-TV network The Tennis Channel and marketing technology business Compulse, which was recently rebranded to Digital Remedy.

Sinclair and its advisors held discussions with potential merger partners earlier this year, CNBC previously reported.

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Starbucks workers and supporters practice picket outside a Starbucks location in New York, US, on Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2025.

Michael Nagle | Bloomberg | Getty Images

More than 100 lawmakers urged Starbucks to resume bargaining talks with Workers United, the union representing the coffee giant’s baristas, in letters sent to CEO Brian Niccol on Monday.

The two letters, from the Congressional Labor Caucus and a group of senators led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., come as the union threatens a strike in 25 cities starting Thursday. That coincides with Starbucks’ Red Cup Day, one of its biggest sales days of the holiday season.

“It is clear that Starbucks has the money to reach a fair agreement with its workers,” the Senate letter, signed by 26 lawmakers, reads. “Starbucks must reverse course from its current posture, resolve its existing labor disputes, and bargain a fair contract in good faith with these employees.”

A second Congressional Labor Caucus letter is signed by 82 lawmakers.

The lawmakers argued the coffee giant has the resources to increase workers’ pay and benefits, citing Niccol’s $95 million compensation since his hiring. The company said $90 million of the compensation package was in the form of stock awards to cover equity Niccol left behind at Chipotle when moving to Starbucks to take the CEO role.

Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) speaks to reporters outside the Senate Chamber of the US Capitol Building on Nov. 8, 2025 in Washington, DC.

Aaron Schwartz | Getty Images

Last week, Workers United said its strike authorization vote won a 92% approval from its members. If the union decides to strike, it would be open-ended. Workers United is pushing for improved hours, higher wages and the resolution of hundreds of unfair labor practice charges against the company.

The two parties are not in active contract talks after discussions fell apart late last year. Starbucks and the union entered into mediation in February, and hundreds of barista delegates voted down the economic package Starbucks proposed in April.

Both sides have pointed blame for failure to reach a bargaining agreement at the other party and say they’re ready to negotiate.

Workers United, which began organizing at Starbucks in 2021, says it now represents more than 12,000 workers across more than 650 stores. The company last week told CNBC that the union only represents 9,500 workers at 550 cafes.

Starbucks Workers United spokesperson Michelle Eisen said in a statement last week, “We want Starbucks to succeed, but turning the company around and bringing customers back begins with listening to and supporting the baristas who are responsible for the Starbucks experience. If Starbucks keeps stonewalling, they should expect to see their business grind to a halt. The ball is in Starbucks’ court.”

In response to the strike vote results last week, Starbucks said it will be ready to serve customers across its nearly 18,000 company-operated and licensed stores this holiday season.

“As everybody knows, Starbucks offers the best job in retail, including more than $30 an hour on average in pay and benefits for hourly partners. Workers United, which represents only 4% of our partners, chose to walk away from the bargaining table. We’ve asked them to return—many times. If they’re ready to come back, we’re ready to talk. We believe we can move quickly to a reasonable deal,” Starbucks spokesperson Jaci Anderson told CNBC in a statement Monday.

In a letter to workers addressing the strike authorization vote last week, Sara Kelly, chief partner officer at Starbucks, echoed the belief that an agreement could be reached swiftly.

“For months, we were at the bargaining table, working in good faith with Workers United and delegates from across the country to reach agreements that make sense for partners and for the long-term success of Starbucks,” Kelly said. “We reached more than 30 tentative agreements on full contract articles.”

“Our commitment to bargaining hasn’t changed,” she added. “Workers United walked away from the table but if they are ready to come back, we’re ready to talk. We believe we can move quickly to a reasonable deal.”

Reuters earlier reported on the letters from lawmakers.

— CNBC’s Amelia Lucas contributed to this report

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