National Banking Symposium – Q2 2026 Sector Outlook

Tom Michaud serves as President and Chief Executive Officer of Keefe, Bruyette & Woods (KBW), an investment bank specializing in the financial services sector. Since joining the firm in 1986 as a credit analyst trainee, he has spent 36 years developing the KBW franchise and leading many of its businesses. Tom co-led the firm’s rebuilding efforts following 9/11 and was instrumental in launching the firm’s IPO in 2006.

Tom was named CEO in October 2011, assuming direction of all business lines in the United States and Europe. Under his leadership, KBW has evolved into the premier investment bank to the financial services industry. The company is routinely recognized for its leadership in mergers & acquisitions, capital raising, and equity research. Tom maintains strong personal relationships with leading industry executives, policy makers, and institutional investors and has been instrumental in executing many of KBW’s largest transactions. More recently, Tom has become a leading authority on the digitalization of banking and the emergence of fintech.

In February 2013, Tom led the firm’s merger into Stifel Financial Corp. (NYSE: SF). KBW is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Stifel and Tom serves as Senior Vice President and a member of Stifel’s Institutional Group Management Committee. Tom is a member of the Board of Directors of 9/11 Day, the nonprofit organization that established and leads the September 11 National Day of Service and Remembrance, the nation’s largest annual day of charitable engagement. He also serves on the Board of the Foreign Policy Association of New York and the Board of Leaders of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California. Tom is a graduate of Middlebury College where he studied Economics and played baseball. Early in his career, Tom attended night school and earned an MBA from NYU's Stern School of Business.

Herman Chan, CFA is a research analyst covering US banks and fintech companies with over two decades of experience in equity research and investor relations. He's served as senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, the research arm of Bloomberg L.P., since 2019 and is a frequent contributor to Bloomberg's news and radio broadcasts. Previously, he worked in investor relations at M&T Bank Corp, a top 20 US commercial bank. Prior to that time, Herman was the senior research analyst at Wells Fargo Securities covering small and mid cap banks. He also has equity research experience covering financial institutions in prior roles at Citigroup, Wachovia Capital Markets and Prudential Equity Group.

Dushyant is the Crypto and Digital Assets market structure research lead at Bloomberg Intelligence, where his work goes out to portfolio managers, CIOs, and asset allocators on the Bloomberg Terminal — alongside our wide coverage of markets, topics, and public/private equities. His focus is to create structural frameworks to understand Crypto/Blockchain rather than chase news or price action. 

Recent work includes a three-model framework for how tokenized equities will actually settle and clear, a six-layer stack for agentic payments, a framework for tracking institutional adoption of Blockchain technology, and a multi-note series about the durability/fragility of US Crypto laws (GENIUS/CLARITY/SEC-CFTC release). His role is translation in both directions — helping crypto-native firms understand how a TradFi institution actually evaluates their pitch, and helping institutional investors distinguish which parts of the crypto build-out are real infrastructure versus narrative. 

Dushyant is active at industry conferences, often on Bloomberg Television, moderating and speaking at Market Structure events, and loves debating and discussing the future of new innovations with clients and industry folks.

Christopher D. Wolfe is a managing director in Fitch Ratings’ financial institutions group. His responsibilities include overseeing the coverage of ratings and analysis on U.S. banking institutions. He is also a member of Fitch’s corporate finance criteria committee.

Prior to joining Fitch in 1999, Christopher was a financial analyst with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He was responsible for collateral valuation and review, and acceptance of accountholders and counterparties with the bank’s credit and risk management department.

Christopher earned a B.S. in business administration from Alfred University in New York.