Finance companies in Boston: an insurance and asset-management town in Census, FDIC and SEC data

This report is for anyone who needs Boston's financial firms as a market: people checking a lender, bank or adviser, job seekers, and B2B sellers whose customers are banks, insurers and investment managers. It combines Census establishment counts, FDIC bank records, the SEC's adviser data and the listed companies' 10-K filings.

Boston's finance industry in Census data

County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 52 (finance and insurance), Boston-Cambridge-Newton, MA-NH Metro Area (CBSA 14460):

The same data by type of firm, with average pay by our calculation:

Carriers are the outlier: 374 locations averaging 123 employees, against 23 for banks and 11 for agencies. That points to large home offices and service operations rather than storefronts.

Middlesex County has the most locations, but Suffolk, which contains the city of Boston, has 49% of the jobs at 46.4 per establishment. Strafford's employee count was published but flagged as high-noise: the noise the Census Bureau adds for confidentiality changed it by 5% or more. These are establishments with paid employees, not companies; branches count separately and the self-employed are left out.

The banks headquartered in the Boston area

In the FDIC's institution data as of 30 June 2026, 58 insured banks have a main office in the metro, with $581.4 billion of assets between them. Twenty-seven are state-chartered savings banks (FDIC class SI).

Besides State Street, 3 have $10 billion to $100 billion of assets, 25 have $1 billion to $10 billion and 29 have less than $1 billion. One name is missing: Santander Holdings USA gives 75 State Street, Boston, as its address in its 10-K, but the FDIC records Santander Bank's main office in Wilmington, Delaware.

The asset managers

The SEC's October 2026 adviser data has 606 registered investment advisers with a main office in the metro, 317 of them with less than $1 billion of regulatory assets. The largest by regulatory assets:

Regulatory assets from Item 5.F of each adviser's Form ADV. One adviser can manage money that another also reports, for example as a sub-adviser, so don't add these up.

The listed finance companies

State Street Corporation, at One Congress Street, reported $13,944 million of total revenue for 2025 in its 10-K, and Safety Insurance Group, at 20 Custom House Street, $1,263.7 million. The other listed finance companies with Boston-area addresses are bank holding companies, including Eastern Bankshares, Beacon Financial, NB Bancorp, Avidia Bancorp, ECB Bancorp and Winchester Bancorp, whose banks appear in the FDIC table.

Checking a Boston finance company

1. For a bank, search FDIC BankFind for insurance status and the main office; for a credit union, NCUA.
2. For a mortgage lender or loan originator, search NMLS Consumer Access.
3. For an adviser, read its Form ADV on the SEC's Investment Adviser Public Disclosure site; for a broker, FINRA BrokerCheck.
4. For state licenses, check with the Massachusetts Division of Banks or the Division of Insurance.

Selling to Boston financial firms

Pick the segment first. Carriers and asset managers buy like enterprises, with procurement, vendor risk and information security reviews; the 29 small banks and hundreds of agencies buy like small businesses, through a president, COO or principal.

Illustrative example. The company, prices and results are invented; the counts are from Census data.

Harborview Claims (harborviewclaims.example) sells software that reads and routes incoming claims documents. Its market is the metro's insurance carrier establishments with 100 or more employees, 73 in Census data, which it expects to collapse to about 35 companies once branches of the same carrier are merged, an illustrative figure. At each it wants the head of claims operations and the CIO: about 70 people. Four carriers at $180,000 a year is $720,000. The research that matters is which carriers are replacing a claims system or consolidating service centers. Bebop finds companies matching a description like that and drafts the first email; for working through a buying committee, see enterprise account research.

Subject: First notice of loss at [carrier]

Hi [first name],

[Carrier] is [hiring claims staff in Boston / moving to a new claims platform]. That's usually when intake becomes the bottleneck: adjusters keying data from PDFs and emails before work can start.

We read and route incoming claim documents automatically for New England carriers, and adjusters start with a complete file.

Could I show you what that looked like for a carrier your size?

[Your name]

Where to look

Next step: see the city's private equity firms by name in private equity firms in Boston, or the region's other employers in companies in Boston.