An expired patent — previously held by Vanguard — may spark a shake-up in the exchange-traded fund industry.

Wall Street saw the patent as critical to Vanguard’s success because it saved an enormous amount of money in taxes. Now, the firm’s ETF competitors could get a chance to use it, too.

“It’s really a game changer,” BNY Mellon’s global head of ETFs’ Ben Slavin told CNBC’s “ETF Edge” this week.

Vanguard’s patent expired in 2023. How it works: Investors can access the same portfolio of stocks through two different formats: a mutual fund and an ETF. The portfolio has the same managers and the same holdings. “ETF Edge” host Bob Pisani notes the advantage is that it reduces taxable events in a (shared) portfolio.

Ben Johnson of Morningstar contends the structure could help millions of investors reduce tax burdens. His research firm describes it as a way for ETFs to exist as a separate share class within a mutual fund.

“ETF share classes appended to the mutual fund would help improve the tax efficiency of the fund to the benefit of everybody,” said Johnson, the firm’s head of client solutions.

It will ultimately come down to approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“My thesis has been that it’s a matter of when, and not if,” said Johnson, who added the ETF industry thinks it could happen as soon as this summer.

A federal judge on Friday ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership, appointed by President Donald Trump, to halt its campaign to hobble the agency.

In a filing, Judge Amy Berman Jackson sided with the CFPB employee union which sued acting CFPB director Russell Vought last month to prevent him from laying off nearly all of the regulator’s staff. Operatives from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have also been involved in efforts to dismantle the bureau.

Berman ordered Vought to reinstate “all probationary and term employees terminated” after Vought took over at the CFPB, and said that he shouldn’t “delete, destroy, remove, or impair agency data.”

“This order shall bind the defendants, their officers, agents, servants, employees, and attorneys, and any other persons who are in active concert or participation with them, such as personnel from the Department of Government Efficiency (“DOGE”),” Berman wrote.

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Charlie Javice, founder of a startup purchased by JPMorgan Chase in 2021, was convicted in federal court Friday of defrauding the bank by vastly overstating the company’s customer list.

The jury decision comes after weeks of testimony in New York over who was to blame for the flameout of a once-promising startup. JPMorgan accused Javice, 32, of duping the bank into paying $175 million for a company that had more than 4 million customers, when in reality it had fewer than 300,000.

A spokesperson for JPMorgan declined to comment.

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