Finance Desk

New U.S. sanctions target Iran’s tech, gold, and shipping sectors, pressing global intermediaries.

The U.S. Department of the Treasury invoked the memory of approximately 160,000 Allied soldiers storming a 50-mile stretch of Normandy’s coast when it published its latest round of secondary sanctions against Iran on Aug. 24. However, rather than capturing Gold, Juno, Omaha, Sword, and Utah beaches, the sanctions seek to hobble Iran’s digital assets, technology, gold, aviation, and shipping sectors.

“In the Second World War, D-Day marked the historic beginning of a campaign with our allies to target and drive the enemy from its positions, including those in third countries,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent posted on the social media platform X, formerly Twitter. “Today, in that same spirit, we are launching an economic onslaught against Iran’s financial connections around the globe. Our objective is to sever every economic lifeline that sustains this tyrannical regime until Tehran stands alone.”

The Treasury, Department of State, and the rebranded Department of War personnel have worked with their counterparts to convey expectations for immediate action on the sanctions.

“Every country will be given a defined timeline to shut down the Iran-related activity we have identified,” the Treasury said in a prepared statement. “If they fail to act, the Treasury will act. Any entity that facilitates money laundering or sanctions evasion on behalf of Iran risks being cut off from the U.S. financial system.”

The new sanctions may deter international companies from doing business in Iran, but their immediate effect may be over-compliance due to the Treasury’s new designations, Kari Heerman, Brookings senior fellow and Director of Trade and Economic Statecraft, told Global Finance.

The harder question is how much additional pressure the latest sanctions have on Iran’s economy.

“Years of sanctions have pushed Iran’s remaining trade toward firms and financial channels more willing or able to tolerate U.S. sanctions,” she added. “That makes evasion more expensive for Iran, but it also makes each successive round of enforcement more difficult for the United States.”

Sanction Penalties

Besides blocking transactions involving property and property interests owned directly or indirectly by designated individuals located in the U.S. or in the possession or control of a U.S. person, they prohibit financial institutions from making any contribution, provision, or receipt of funds, goods, or services by, to, or for the benefit of any designated individual no matter their location.

At the time of the announcement, the Treasury had already sanctioned more than 60 entities, individuals, and vessels located in China, Europe, Hong Kong, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and other regions that have worked with Iran’s Ministry of Defense and Armed Forces Logistics and its Ministry of Intelligence and Security. 

As the newly minted sanctions target entities further up Iran’s supply chains, they stop short of reaching major Chinese financial institutions that have been Iran’s lifelines.

“Targeting a major Chinese bank could have a much larger deterrent effect than sanctioning smaller intermediaries, but it could also provoke Chinese retaliation and affect other U.S. objectives, including the economic issues Washington, D.C., hopes to address at next month’s Trump-Xi summit,” said Heerman. “Bessent’s comment that he does not want to ‘blow up the global financial system’ acknowledges the most powerful sanctions tools can also be the most costly to use.”

Hours after the announcement, the Iranian rial plummeted on the open market, trading at roughly 2 million rials to a single U.S. dollar.

How key international trade partners respond to this new round of U.S. sanctions will ultimately reveal if Washington has gone a bridge too far.

Rob Daly covers fintech and the economy. Contact him at rdaly@gfmag.com.

JPMorgan Chase dominates other banks when it comes to AI banking citations, but regional banks are invisible.

Whenever someone poses banking-related inquiries to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, the biggest banks are getting upstaged by third-party comparison hubs and media outlets.

Three websites in particular — Bankrate, Investopedia and Wikipedia — supply 68% of all banking-related AI citations, according to an “AI Visibility” report from communications firm 5WPR. Bank-owned domains, meanwhile, account for less than 7%.

Even within the narrow slice of visibility banks do capture, one name dominates. In response to real consumer questions, such as “best bank near me” or “top bank in [state],” JPMorgan Chase & Co. holds 28.4% of consumer banking AI citation share in the U.S. That’s more than Bank of America (7.1%), Wells Fargo (5.9%), Citi (4.8%), and Capital One (4.2%) combined.

The findings underscore a new reality in the AI era: brand prestige matters less if a chatbot leaves a bank out of the conversation entirely.

JPMorgan Leads Chatbot Citations

“It isn’t accidental,” Ronn Torossian, founder and chairman of 5WPR, told Global Finance in an email. JPMorgan Chase operates more than 4,800 branches across the U.S., but “branch count has almost nothing to do with it,” he added.

Whenever someone consults an AI platform about where to bank, the New York-based firm wins the AI answer outright in only three states: New York, Illinois, and Arizona. Still, Chase owes its AI presence to machine-readable content on its own site, combined with a press footprint that keeps it landing in outlets AI engines already trust, Torossian explained.

But the bank hasn’t locked in the lead just yet. “This is a snapshot, and AI citation patterns shift as engines update retrieval and as competitors invest in the same levers,” he added. “Any bank willing to match that content and structural investment can close the gap.”

Until then, AI assistants will likely continue citing media coverage of banks rather than the banks themselves, he added.

“What these publishers [Bankrate, Investopedia, Wikipedia and also NerdWallet] are doing right is straightforward: comprehensive, frequently updated comparison content, clear schema markup, strong domain authority, and a format built to directly answer the exact questions people and now AI are asking,” Torossian said.

These sites present direct ‘best’ and ‘worst’ rankings of banks, credit cards, and other financial products, giving AI engines structured data to pull from.

Bankrate, for example, feeds answers to specific inquiries about borrowing and connects them with competing lenders. This forces banks to up their game to win over potential customers.

“When banks compete, users get better [interest] rates that help them save money more easily and more effectively,” Bankrate editor-in-chief John Puterbaugh said in an email. “Our commitment to consumer advocacy and helping people get better deals runs across our whole business, and we believe this approach will win even as AI platforms and LLMs continue to evolve.”

What Are Banks Doing Wrong?

Bank websites, by contrast, typically heighten the marketing language to tout their products and offerings. The problem? AI engines ignore that type of content and, instead, identify content that answers specific questions with clarity.

As Andy Mollison, head of search and Innovation at Varn Search Marketing, puts it: AI systems are built around language.

“Vague claims such as ‘we go above and beyond’ provide little useful information,” Mollison said in an email. “A statement such as ‘customers can access support 24 hours a day, seven days a week’ is concrete, verifiable and far more likely to match a user’s query.”

Regulatory and compliance constraints also limit how banks communicate in ways that don’t affect financial-information publishers, Mollison explained. “That often leaves them with less educational content, and more content that is cautious, technical or heavily qualified,” he added.

As a result, publishers have the AI advantage over banks, because they write in language that matches how people actually ask questions.

Regional Banks Face a Discovery Gap

Perhaps the starkest finding from the 5WPR report is this: 22 of the 75 largest U.S. banks registered less than 0.3% citation share. Top bank names — Fifth Third, KeyBank, M&T, Huntington and Regions — barely show up despite their branch networks. Meanwhile, fintech challengers are eating their lunch.

Chime, SoFi, Ally and Discover now out-cite regional banks like PNC, Truist, U.S. Bank and Citizens in AI answers, despite operating with a fraction of the deposit base.

“These five banks registering under 0.3% citation share despite significant size and branch networks isn’t a vanity-metric problem; it’s a discovery problem,” Torossian said. “As more consumers use AI assistants as a first stop for financial research, a bank that’s missing from those answers is missing from consideration at the exact moment decisions are being formed.”

5WPR is careful to frame the index not as a hard count pulled from platform query logs. “Nobody outside those companies has access to that, and any firm claiming otherwise is overselling,” Torossian said. He also acknowledged the report can’t yet tie citation share to account openings or traffic. AI platforms, after all, don’t publish that data. “We’re measuring the front door. We’re not measuring the sale,” he said.

Why AI Invisibility Is Risky

Still, Torossian argued that waiting for proof before investing in AI visibility carries its own risk.

Recall the early days of search engine optimization when Google’s search algorithms transformed how businesses competed online. Companies began investing heavily in web presence during the so-called “SEO Gold Rush” in the early 2000s.

“The brands that showed up first captured the customers,” Torossian said. The ones that waited for proof spent the next decade “trying to catch up,” he added.

“That’s the same bet regional banks made about search fifteen years ago,” he added. “And it’s the same bet that let fintechs out-cite them in AI answers today.”

5WPR isn’t the only agency tracking AI usage among bank consumers. Wells Fargo published a survey in April, alongside the American Bankers Association, reporting that 19% of U.S. adults (and 38% of Gen Z) use AI for financial advice. Two-thirds of those respondents acted on the AI financial suggestions and said those recommendations proved profitable or worthwhile.

In other words, facts matter. Tyler Desjardin, the founder of Pivot Creative Media, a firm that focuses on improving business visibility when it comes to SEO and AI-generated results, advises clients to prioritize just that.

“Brands need to ensure that they provide accurate information so that AI does not have to create something that could be misleading to search engines,” Desjardin said. “Visibility should come from structured information that conveys correct facts, rather than trying to game the system, since AI automatically eliminates any thin or misleading content.”

Anthony Noto covers corporate finance and private credit. Contact him at anoto@gfmag.com