Dallas is beefing up to challenge Wall Street as a financial mecca. What does that mean?

What is now Uptown Dallas lost its cattle long ago. They have been replaced with glimmering office towers reaching to the sky, bleached condominiums for young professionals and haute French bistros.

However, a bull is charging through Dallas’ northern urban core. Unlike the black cow statues Harwood International has placed in the area, this bovine is dynamic, constantly evolving and especially beholden to the idea of no state income tax. But similar to the Harwood statues, which pay homage to the real estate company’s Swiss founder, it’s more idea than flesh and blood.

The bull is momentum. The bull is hope in a rapidly growing financial services sector based in North Texas, colloquially known as “Y’all Street,” with the area around Klyde Warren Park as the epicenter. During a fireside chat at the Texas Bankers Association convention in May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott optimistically proclaimed Texas the “Financial Capital of America.”

In mid-June, contractors began pouring the roof of a 30-story, $433 million office tower immediately overlooking Klyde Warren Park that will eventually be home to Bank of America’s Dallas presence. The building will also host the offices of the first Texas-based national exchange, the Texas Stock Exchange, which launches initial trading next week. 

To the west, Goldman Sachs is building a $500 million-plus campus in Victory Park that will make Dallas its second-largest hub outside of New York City. And on McKinney Avenue, Morgan Stanley is considering a $700 million regional headquarters that could bring thousands of jobs to Uptown and downtown Dallas over the next decade.

What is Y’all Street?

Dallas-Fort Worth as a whole now boasts the largest concentration of financial sector jobs outside New York, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. There has been an accelerating trend of corporate relocations from traditional hubs and satellite openings by financial firms, and not just in Dallas. JPMorgan Chase now has more employees at its Plano regional center than in New York, while Charles Schwab left San Francisco after close to a half-century in 2020 to open a new headquarters in Westlake. 

New York institutions are taking notice. After plans for the Texas Stock Exchange (TXSE) were announced in 2024, the New York Stock Exchange announced it would move its Chicago branch to Dallas, with the tech-oriented NASDAQ exchange following suit shortly after. In a Truth Social post from last October, President Donald Trump wrote that the “Texas Exchange will be taking ALL of this business away,” while criticizing New York Attorney General Leticia James. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson has also been quick to criticize the largest U.S. financial services hub while pitching Y’all Street, telling reporters that the city was set on “punishing success” during a trip to New York that included a bell-ringing at the NYSE.

The exchanges won’t have the traditional trading floors often associated with stock trading, and the jobs they bring in on their own will not be substantial. Digitalization has largely replaced the need for floor traders, NASDAQ and NYSE are only opening regional exchanges, and TXSE will start out at about 100 employees. But they will likely spark further interest from financial institutions in North Texas operations and job growth in sectors indirectly involved in stock trading. Just having them in Dallas is symbolic of changing dynamics.

“We’re the only city in the country that will have three exchanges… that’s not just a U.S. story, that’s a global story,” Linda McMahon, CEO of the Dallas Economic Development Corporation, said.

McMahon also said that Y’all Street could potentially become a place findable on GPS systems in the future.

“There has been conversations about perhaps we should name a street Y’all Street,” she said.

What’s led to this?

Cotton, livestock and oil industries in Texas have long looked to Dallas as a regional financial center — so much so, that in 1986, three of the top 25 largest banks in the U.S. were located in Dallas. That fell apart in the oil crash shortly thereafter, but Dallas remained prominent in the regional sector through the millennium change. In 2000, Dallas-Fort Worth was home to roughly 212,000 jobs in the financial services and insurance sectors.

By 2025, that number had increased to just under 390,000, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“We passed Philadelphia in 2006 and moved up into fourth place,” Mike Rosa, senior vice president of the Dallas Regional Chamber, said. “More recently, like the last five years or so, we’ve passed Chicago and LA, and now we’re number two.”

Attracting jobs, corporate moves and economic growth is the core of the DRC’s mission. The Chamber communicates with city officials throughout DFW to advance economically aligned policy and compiles data to market the region to companies looking to relocate. That could mean connecting interested companies with local governments to arrange sought-after incentives, or in some cases, flying to traditional hubs to recruit corporations.

“The CEO of a pretty significant California company, once we got in the door, spent 30 minutes talking about how California’s not working for them, and the lack of responsiveness, the lack of just appreciation for business and corporations, and what they bring to the table,” Rosa said.

Texas has also taken a series of legislative actions designed to further incentivize business growth. In addition to enabling municipal tax credits designed to lure companies to the state, Texas lawmakers have loosened restrictions on incorporation and created specialized business courts to facilitate moves away from the traditional corporate listing hub in Delaware.

As North Texas has added millions of people to become the third-largest metropolitan area in the U.S., the business boom has catalyzed and continued alongside rapid population growth. From 2024 to 2025, the DRC tracked 80 major corporate relocations and moves, including NYSE’s move from Chicago. 

“The DFW story is going to be really great 50 years from now,” Rosa said. “If we are a center, a corporate center, and if we’re a financial center, in some ways, you just got to have that to be relevant.”

Financial services accelerate  

Financial sector growth has accelerated, as the Chamber also tracked 33 financial sector relocations from 2010 to 2019. In just the last six years, over 50 financial institutions have made major moves to North Texas, he said.

Cullum Clark, an economist and fellow with the Bush Institute, said there are a few factors driving the financial services renaissance in Dallas.

“Bigger factors would include going to a state where there’s no income tax. It would include going to a place that is kind of generally very business-friendly, that it sort of isn’t making life more difficult,” Clark said. “And then you get these very specific changes that Texas has made that are specific to the finance sector.”

In 2025, Texas voters passed a lawmaker-supported proposition to prohibit taxes on securities trading. Furthermore, voters approved a proposition banning state capital gains taxes, and Abbott has also signed a bill into law granting tax exemptions for stock exchanges. Corporate litigation reform has also been cited as a factor.

Clark said that extreme regulation in traditional hubs has led to increased interest in moving to Texas, as has a decentralization tied to the rise of digital trading, which decreased the need to concentrate the sector in New York. Those factors have helped fuel the move of major institutions like Goldman and the creation of national stock exchanges, which he said will help further stimulate activity.

“It’s the symbolism of it, like, ‘Wait a second, like that’s something I attached to New York, like the Statue of Liberty or Broadway,’” Clark said. “‘Like that’s not supposed to happen somewhere else.’ Wait a second, it starts to happen someplace else, it probably causes people to think differently about the location of business activities.”

Stock Exchanges

Based out of Old Parkland Hospital, NYSE Texas launched as a fully electronic equities exchange in 2025, while NASDAQ’s Texas operation came online in March 2026. Both operate as dual listing exchanges.

Dual-listing exchanges operate as “secondary” venues for companies seeking to market to new investors and raise additional capital. Companies listed with secondary markets often retain primary exchanges, with most of NASDAQ and NYSE’s Texas listings already trading in New York. A primary listing exchange is the company’s “home” exchange and regulates it through a variety of listing standards, governance criteria, shareholder rules and disclosure requirements.

To float stock on an exchange, companies pay application fees, initial listing fees and annual dues. NYSE, for example, charges a yearly minimum listing fee of $84,000, which can increase to $500,000 depending on the number of shares traded. They must apply for listing, maintain a certain minimum valuation ($5 million for NASDAQ) and adhere to the standards set by the primary listing exchange.

Cutting red tape is an area where leaders of the homegrown exchange feel they can make gains on the “big two” in New York. Unlike the secondary branch exchanges opened by NASDAQ and NYSE, TXSE will be a primary exchange designed to directly compete for listings with the legacy operations in New York.

“The legacy exchanges didn’t announce they were creating subsidiaries until TXSE announced their formation,” Jeb Hensarling, a strategic adviser and governance board member for TXSE, said. “So that tells you something there, that if they did not take the competition seriously, they wouldn’t kind of pump up these subsidiaries of theirs.”

In June 2024, TXSE announced it had gained SEC approval to launch the first national primary exchange headquartered in Texas. With over $270 million in backing from institutional investors like Blackrock and JPMorgan, TXSE will enter the market as the most well-capitalized exchange ever approved by the SEC. 

Hensarling is a former U.S. congressman who served as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee during his tenure. He said the competitive advantage offered by TXSE will be found on balance sheets unburdened with New York regulations.

“We do not have the tax burden that the legacy exchanges have,” he said. “They have to pass those on ultimately to come companies, and it could make its way down to the retail investor, so TXSE is going to be an issuer-aligned exchange.”

He cited lower listing fees, fewer restrictions on board composition and an ability to advocate with lawmakers — founder Jim Lee has been with Abbott as he signed deregulation bills — as major draws for companies. Initial public offerings, which are the first time a company sells shares on an exchange, have declined in recent years. Hensarling said the company will begin IPOs in 2027, and that the looser regulatory framework could help reverse the trend. 

Although the TXSE office will not have a traditional trading floor teeming with ravenous blue-vested stockmen, company leaders are looking to have a stock ticker floating red or green exchange symbols outside of their Uptown office. There will also be bell-ringing ceremonies akin to those in New York, though indications suggest the TXSE ceremony will have a more Texan flavor.

Energy companies and Texas corporations could be major drivers for TXSE, Hensarling said, who added that Y’all Street could be the start of something larger for North Texas.

“This is a marathon, it’s not a sprint, but Texas can grow to be that financial capital of the US, and ultimately in the world,” he said. “That could be the single most important economic chapter in Dallas’ history, and we’re here to see the birth of it.”

What does this mean for Dallas?

The job growth brought directly by the three exchanges will not exactly move the needle. NASDAQ will base most of its 120-plus North Texas employees at its Uptown office, while TXSE will hire at most around 250. But if they stimulate further interest from the financial sector, as Clark said they very likely could, then more jobs will follow.

Goldman’s Uptown office could host up to 5,000 employees, Scotiabank’s new regional hub in Uptown brought over 1,000 jobs when it opened earlier this year, and if Morgan Stanley decides to build in Dallas, the campus is expected to net the city up to 3,800 jobs over the next decade. And investment from financial institutions could translate into job growth in other areas, he said.

“If you’re an aspirational young person who wants to get ahead in life, you’d rather be in a rising place than a falling place, and if a place is rising enough, it creates great opportunities across many, many fields,” Clark, who added that the opportunities might be limited to those with educational or technical training, said. “Just the Y’all Street phenomenon alone would create jobs in banking, law, accounting. Loads of IT jobs both inside the Wall Street type firms, but also in outside firms that serve finance as a customer.”

The growth of Y’all Street could further drive population growth, adding to more jobs in healthcare, he said, as well as ancillary jobs in construction.

In terms of Dallas proper, Y’all Street is mostly centered on Uptown, Victory Park and the northern parts of the Central Business District. At a time when the city center’s future picture is made bleak by the potential loss of the Stars and Mavericks, and the definite departure of AT&T and Neiman Marcus’ flagship location, the investment around Klyde Warren Park offers a bright spot, Clark said.

“That is where a very disproportionate amount of the highest-end finance and related activities are taking place, or are going to take place,” he said. “That area is super hot, I mean, that’s that. No reason to be concerned about that anytime soon.”

However, it will not be the proverbial silver bullet for downtown Dallas. Aging office infrastructure is unlikely to entice companies to move further downtown, where Clark said the future will be largely residential. He added that if redevelopment does not take place and public safety and corporate concerns regarding city governance, as evidenced in emails between AT&T leaders and Dallas officials, are not addressed, it could create an environment “where the struggling parts of downtown will expand.”

“I think there is growing concern about governance in the city of Dallas of, is the city government capable of performing its job well? And it seems like it’s not about any one person or group of people,” he said. “It seems like it’s a recurring, just a growing concern.”

Clark disputed the idea that Texas will become the heart of financial activity in the U.S. anytime soon, adding that New York isn’t collapsing overnight and that “they’re gonna put up a good fight.” Instead, he said a separation is more likely.

“It’s not obvious we are number two now, because you’d have pretty good-sized numbers in the Chicago area and pretty good-sized numbers in the New York area, and not tiny in the Bay Area, but I think we will become a clear number two, most likely, if we don’t do anything to blow it.”