4 July 2 - 8, 2026 dallasobserver.com DALLAS OBSERVER Classified | MusiC | dish | Culture | unfair Park | Contents Dallas is beefing up to challenge Wall Street as a financial mecca. What does that mean for North Texas? BY AUSTIN WOOD W hat is now Uptown Dal- las lost its cattle long ago. They have been re- placed with glimmering office towers reaching to the sky, bleached condominiums for young professionals and haute French bis- tros. 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 dy- namic, 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 com- pany’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 fire- side chat at the Texas Bankers Association convention in May, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott optimistically proclaimed Texas the “Finan- cial Capital of America.” In mid-June, contractors began pouring the roof of a 30-story, $433 million office tower immediately overlooking Klyde War- ren 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. JP- Morgan Chase now has more employees at its Plano regional center than in New York, while Charles Schwab left San Francisco af- ter 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 re- porters that the city was set on “punishing success” during a trip to New York that in- cluded 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 trad- ers, NASDAQ and NYSE are only opening regional exchanges, and TXSE will start out at about 100 employees. But they will likely spark further inter- est from financial institutions in North Texas opera- tions and job growth in sectors indirectly involved in stock trading. Just having them in Dallas is symbolic of changing dy- namics. “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 Mc- Mahon, CEO of the Dallas Economic Devel- opment 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 fi- nancial 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 re- mained 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 in- surance 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, se- nior 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 eco- nomic growth is the core of the DRC’s mis- sion. The Chamber communicates with city officials throughout DFW to advance eco- nomically aligned policy and compiles data to market the region to companies looking to relocate. That could mean connecting in- terested companies with local governments to arrange sought-after incentives, or in some cases, flying to traditional hubs to re- cruit corporations. “The CEO of a pretty significant California company, once we got | UNFAIR PARK | GOV. GREG ABBOTT PROCLAIMED TEXAS THE “FINANCIAL CAPITAL OF AMERICA.” Photo-illustration by Kristin Bjornsen / Source images via Adobe Stock >> p6 Y’ALL, NOT WALL
