• Ryan Lake and Stephen Rooney lead JPMorgan's beverage banking business.
• Beverage M&A is expected to rebound, and they said big brands want to capitalize on the wellness boom.
• The bankers broke down where they turn to spot regional trends and the advice they're giving CEOs.

When Ryan Lake and Stephen Rooney scan a bar menu, they might spot a drink they once evaluated — or helped sell.

The JPMorgan bankers cover the beverage industry, talking to everyone from executives to beer distributors to lawyers to retailers to figure out where consumer tastes are headed.

After a slowdown last year, partly due to tariffs, the pair is prepping to leverage that expertise as beverage M&A is expected to rebound in 2026, according to the investment bank Capstone Partners.

"There's been so much activity in the smaller space — bigger players buying smaller brands that are higher growth, maybe more health and wellness focused," Rooney said.

Lake, who joined JPMorgan in September and is based in Arizona, has covered beverages for more than 20 years and now focuses on mid-cap and fast-growing insurgent brands. In his previous role at Arlington Capital, he advised Stone Brewing on its $165 million sale to Sapporo. New York-based Rooney, who focuses on large-cap brands like Pepsi and is a leader on the investment bank's consumer and retail team, has spent nearly 15 years in the sector. He recently advised Alani Nu, an energy drink brand, on its $1.8 billion sale to Celsius, a deal that helped Celsius diversify its portfolio and reach more women.

Their partnership fits into JPMorgan's middle market banking push, working with a team of nearly 300 bankers across the company focused on founder-run companies rooted in local economies. Business Insider spoke with Lake and Rooney about opportunities in the beverage sector and the advice they're giving CEOs.

Large companies are eager for growth and increasingly turning to acquisitions to expand into new categories, price points, and geographies, the bankers said. That requires them to collaborate closely, since together they share insight across the market.

Spotting the next trend

The pair relies on what Lake calls an "early radar system," built on continuous communication with an ecosystem of companies, buyers, and investors. They might, for example, be able to spot a hot regional brand before it blows up on a national scale.

In a small, tightly knit industry with high barriers to entry — from dense liquor laws to understanding the cost of shipping water — relationships are crucial.

"If you do things the right way, it's a massive accelerator, because people will give you good referrals and talk well about you," Lake said. "If you do things the wrong way, everyone knows who you are pretty quickly."

Right now, large and small brands are trying to cash in on the boom in functional beverages, whether that's in the form of energy drinks or protein shakes. But Lake said that trends shift quickly, and today's protein maxxing could give way to something else, like a fiber craze.

Even so, he and Rooney caution clients against chasing every single trend, and often talk about staying focused. While M&A can drive growth, exploring too many options can risk losing or diluting a brand's identity.

Gen Z's drinking isn't so simple

If health drinks are having their moment, alcohol is struggling — but some of the issues may be overstated, Lake said.

Gen Z and those on GLP-1s are often cited as drinking less, and the rise in GLP, though the bankers said the reality is more complicated. Some Gen Z consumers are under 21, and those who can legally drink might be financially strapped.

"You're paying out the arm and the leg for housing and healthcare and for fuel — it's hard to actually go out and drink when you don't have the money for it," he said, adding that it could be years before we know whether alcohol is in a structural decline.

Just as the long-term alcohol trends are unclear, the beverage sector generally is as volatile as consumer tastes, which Lake and Rooney said can make it especially exciting. They've started lending to a company doing $5 million in revenue, only to watch it grow into a brand worth hundreds of millions.

"You do see that sort of meteoric rise of companies, because of the ever-changing consumer demand," he said.

• Saul Van Beurden thinks employers and employees share responsibility for AI adoption.
• Wells Fargo doesn't mandate AI use; instead, it aims to generate "grassroots enthusiasm."
• Van Beurden said employees need new skills to stay competitive for both redeployment and new jobs.

Saul Van Beurden is the man helping Wells Fargo confront a question hanging over banks of every size: What happens to jobs in the age of AI?

He and his central team can't, and shouldn't, figure out what an AI-ready Wells Fargo looks like alone. The bank must teach employees skills to stay competitive in a changing industry, and they must choose to learn them, Van Beurden said.

"You cannot deny things," Van Beurden, who is the head of AI and the co-CEO of consumer banking and lending, told Business Insider. "But how do you make it a thing where everybody has a role to play and takes their own accountability and responsibility?"

The bank is leaning on AI literacy programs and demos, among other things, to hopefully inspire "grassroots enthusiasm." The goal is to make employees comfortable enough with the technology that they can be redeployed if their jobs change, or competitive in the job market if they leave Wells Fargo, he said. Wells Fargo doesn't mandate AI usage, even as it bets the technology will help supercharge its growth following the Federal Reserve's decision to lift a $1.95 trillion asset cap.

Van Beurden thinks that fluency starts outside the office. He's trying to build an agent to help pull documents for his 2026 tax returns, and believes it's crucial for employees to use AI in their personal lives, too.

"It's really important to have that personal usage, to understand the power of what it can do. And then we are enabling that and allowing that to happen at the workplace," he said.

Still, Van Beurden emphasized that everyone needs to "stay cognitive," since AI could generate all of our ideas if we let it. He suspects that most college students are comfortable with technology but should invest time in activities like reading or playing chess. Staying sharp, he thinks, will help them in what's broadly a brutal job market.

Wells' workforce, like many of its competitors, is already changing because of AI. The bank's CEO, Charlie Scharf, said in November that it will probably "have less head count as we look forward," and added in December that generative AI has already made engineers up to 35% more productive.

Van Beurden didn't say whether the bank would need 30% fewer engineers as a result or whether it would necessarily alter hiring, leaving it at, "it's a great question." Instead, he said that growth and head count aren't always one-to-one.

"How great is it to grow without the need to hire people, because you have created the capacity to take on more clients, to take on more customers with the same amount of people?" he said, calling AI the "ideal tool" for that growth. Wells Fargo recorded $21.3 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter, up 4% year over year; revenue in its consumer bank, which Van Beurden oversees, rose 7% year over year.

The leaders of other big banks have also said that AI will likely eliminate some jobs and slow hiring, both publicly and in internal memos. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon has said his bank has "huge redeployment plans."

Efficiency promises and big technology budgets aside, the head count cuts haven't yet materialized at most banks. Around 60% of 240 financial services CEOs surveyed by EY said they expect AI investments to maintain or boost their head count this year.