The FDIC publishes one of the better datasets in American economic life. Every quarter, every federally insured bank files a Call Report — assets, deposits, loans, net interest margin, capital ratios, charge-offs, the lot — and the FDIC makes the result public through its BankFind site and a JSON API. The data is excellent. The interfaces around it are not. Most readers who want a clean answer to a basic question — how is the industry doing this quarter, how does my regional bank compare to its peers, which institutions hold deposits in my city — end up bouncing between a 1990s-style web form, a sparse mobile-unfriendly profile page, and a CSV they have to clean before they can chart it.
The U.S. Banking Industry Data Explorer is our attempt to close that gap. It's a free site, no login, that sits on top of the FDIC BankFind API and Census Bureau ACS data and gives a reader six concrete things to look at, each readable in a few seconds and each backed by official numbers rather than ours.
What it does
The Explorer pulls in every active FDIC-insured institution — roughly 4,400 banks across the 50 states — and carries about fifteen years of history per bank. The capabilities are organized as six views:
- Industry Health. A one-page read on the U.S. banking system. Active and peak institution counts, the long arc of consolidation, median return on assets, and a short AI-generated narrative of where the sector stands this quarter. Six key health indicators sit next to a trend chart that updates when you click a different indicator.
- Bank Research. A search across every FDIC-insured institution by name, state, city, charter type, and asset size. Useful for finding the right cert number on a bank you only half-remember the name of, or for assembling a list of every community bank in a single state.
- Bank Profile. For any individual bank, a historical view of the financials that matter: assets and deposits over time, loan composition, profitability (ROA, ROE, NIM), risk (Tier 1 capital, non-performing loans), and efficiency. CSV and PDF export are available.
- Peer Comparison. Pick up to five banks and put them side by side across the same metrics. The combination most people actually want to make ("how does this regional bank stack up against four others its size?") takes about ten seconds to set up.
- Performance Benchmarks. National medians and averages by asset-size tier, from community banks under $1B to the largest institutions over $250B. Useful when you want to know whether a single bank's number is normal for its size or genuinely an outlier.
- Consumer Footprint. For any bank, a map of its branch network laid over Census ACS data. Income, age, education, home values, home ownership, and poverty appear as population-weighted indices against national averages, alongside a race/ethnicity breakdown and a state coverage chart. Two banks' footprints can be compared side by side from a shared URL.
Each view is designed for the same reader: someone who already knows what question they want answered and doesn't want to spend an afternoon getting the data into shape before they can answer it.
Who it is for
This was built for the people who have to know something about a bank, or about the industry, without being a bank examiner. That includes corporate treasurers and CFOs evaluating where their deposits live, board members of bank holding companies who want their own read on peer performance, policy and regulatory staff who need a quick handle on consolidation or capital adequacy, journalists writing about a specific institution, real-estate and consumer-finance teams sizing a new market by branch demographics, and students or researchers who want clean access to call report data without writing the FDIC API plumbing themselves.
The Explorer pairs naturally with The U.S. Sentiment Signal, our monthly composite of national well-being indicators. The Signal answers how the country is feeling about the economy this month; the Explorer answers how the financial system that intermediates that economy is actually performing. Read together, they make the relationship between mood and institutional health visible in a way neither does on its own.
The U.S. Banking Industry Data Explorer is free to use at /insights/banking-industry/. It updates as new FDIC call reports are published, with no account required. If your team has a use we haven't built for yet, or a metric the public dataset supports that we haven't surfaced, get in touch.