JPMorgan Chase & Co in June launched its first ETF and already plans to bring more funds to market, while Wells Fargo & Co received regulatory permission in August to offer ETFs.
The move is seen by some as a defensive play by banks with their own wealth management clients. The banks can use their own ETFs to hold onto assets of customers showing some willingness to abandon traditional mutual funds and move into the $1.9 trillion U.S. ETF market, which has more than doubled in the past five years.
"You're increasingly seeing that cannibalization is less of a concern than the outright loss of those assets," Johnson said, pointing to one of the concerns of mutual fund providers that has kept some from offering their strategies in ETF form.
Unlike the biggest ETF providers - BlackRock, State Street Corp and Vanguard, who together account for about 70 percent of the market - banks are putting more emphasis on their existing active investing capabilities.
The asset management businesses of Goldman, JPMorgan and Wells Fargo are already among the largest in the country, according to Thomson Reuters Lipper.