By Andy Serwer and Rebecca Ungarino
Jamie Dimon is telling us all about his plans.
He wants to start a news outlet that covers public policy -- appealing to "nerds like me," Dimon says. There's always government service, like Treasury Secretary -- "It's too late for me to run for president." He could stay on as chairman of JPMorgan Chase after he steps down as CEO. Or maybe he'll write a book. And he'd like to own a bar.
So many options, though sorting through them will come later. For now, Dimon has his hands full running the nation's largest bank, which he intends to do for at least three or four more years, "board willing," he says. Besides, he already has a bar, called Morgan's ("my idea") at the company's new, audacious $4 billion Manhattan headquarters.
The elegant, amenity-filled interior of the Norman Foster-designed 1,388-foot tower belies the real work still to be done; Dimon's remit has arguably never been more challenging. It isn't just war in the Middle East, or that the Trump administration poses unprecedented uncertainty, or that the bank faces a raft of new competitors in payments, crypto, private equity and credit, and fintech. And it isn't just that many of JPMorgan's competitors, even Citigroup and Wells Fargo, are in good shape, too, or that artificial intelligence could reorder the bank's business, or that risk from exposure to private-credit loans could worsen. It isn't even that, yes, Dimon needs to name a successor at some point.
Dimon's biggest test is simply topping what he has already done -- no easy task at JPMorgan, after decades of world-beating success. JPMorgan Chase under Dimon, the most consequential banker of his generation, has rocked the banking world. It bought and integrated First Republic (helping to stamp out the banking kerfuffle of 2023 in the process). It took over the Apple card, with its $20 billion of customer accounts, following the iPhone maker's troubled collaboration with Goldman Sachs Group. The bank launched an effort to oversee $1.5 trillion of investments in U.S. national security and hired Todd Combs, one of Warren Buffett's key lieutenants, to help run it. And there's the new building, which takes up a whole city block in the middle of the densest, priciest section of Manhattan, which came with Dimon's five-day in-office mandate for employees.
And as for Dimon himself, he has hit some milestones, too, recently marking his 20th anniversary as CEO and his 70th birthday on Friday the 13th.
Then there's this: Since Dimon became CEO on Jan. 1, 2006, JPM's stock is up 626% versus 429% for the S&P 500 index and 43% for the KBW Bank Index. JPM's $777 billion market value makes it the biggest bank in the world, larger than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup, its three legacy competitors, combined.
Dimon has been rewarded for his trouble. According to research firm Equilar, he has taken home a total of $1 billion in compensation during his tenure. Shocking, perhaps, but note that he has helped the bank's market cap grow by $638 billion.
It's all pretty impressive, but as a reminder of how fleeting success -- and legacy -- can be, JPM's stock year to date is down over 10%, lagging behind both the S&P 500 and the bank index.
As we head into what looks to be Dimon's stretch run, he and his team are determined to keep the winning streak alive. Barron's spoke with Dimon and many of his top deputies in their 47th-floor offices, including a nearly two-hour sit-down with Dimon. The bank's leaders addressed challenges, from relentless competition and shifting political winds to succession.
Opportunities abound, they believe. Beyond internal growth, "we are looking like a hawk at M&A [mergers and acquisitions]," says Mary Callahan Erdoes, who leads JPMorgan's asset- and wealth management group. "Dining is a huge category for us; travel is an even bigger category," consumer-banking chief Marianne Lake says. The investment bank, says co-head Doug Petno, can expand in Turkey, Australia, Japan, and the Middle East.
Seated in his office beneath a retroreflective vinyl American flag created by New York artist Hank Willis Thomas, Dimon says all of his businesses can grow organically. Difficult, he says, but preferable to acquisitions. Competing in sales and trading is "like trench warfare," says the ever-blunt CEO, his left hand wrapped in a cast from a recent surgery for bone spurs.
Dimon's office, where he gave us his first interview since moving in, is as much a reflection of his career, JPMorgan, and America as it is a room for work. Certified replicas of the 1804 dueling pistols used by Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr -- who co-founded JPMorgan's earliest predecessor firm -- lie in velvet casing. He has two Smith Barney bookends (one a bull, one a bear). A 2010 New York Times Magazine cover featuring Dimon, dubbed " America's Least-Hated Banker," hangs on the wall. There's a framed photo of Dimon with actor Bill Pullman, who portrayed him in the 2011 film Too Big to Fail.
That was then, though. Now Dimon is steering his firm through President Donald Trump's second term, which has been marked by volatility and even attacks on Dimon himself. On Jan. 22, Trump sued the bank and Dimon over claims of so-called debanking.
"We don't use that word," Dimon says when we ask about the complaint. "It's 'exiting clients.' "
Any update there? "I'm not going to talk about specific accounts," Dimon says. "He has the right to sue us. We have the right to defend ourselves. That's what courts are for."
Dimon says he hasn't met with Trump since he filed the lawsuit. They briefly saw each other at the Alfalfa Club's annual dinner in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 31.
Dimon is on board with Kevin Warsh, Trump's selection for Federal Reserve chair. "I believe he'll try to be independent. He's a smart person. He knows his job," he says. "But that doesn't mean President Trump won't try to -- President Trump's going to say what he wants to say."
JPMorgan operates three core divisions: consumer and community banking (catering to Main Street), commercial and investment banking (Wall Street), and the asset- and wealth management group (investors and very wealthy people). Its Wall Street and Main Street engines drove some 42% and 41% of revenue in 2025, respectively. The asset- and wealth-management business is the smallest but also the most profitable.
The company, which made $57 billion in net profit in 2025 after a record $58.5 billion the prior year, has a champagne problem: tens of billions of dollars in excess capital (so called on Wall Street because it's well above regulatory minimums). JPMorgan could use its billions to buy back shares, fund an acquisition, or invest in activities like lending.
"We're going to deploy [capital]," Jeremy Barnum, JPMorgan's chief financial officer, said last month. "We're going to grow [risk-weighted assets]. We've done buybacks. We've done dividends, and all the other organic and inorganic opportunities are always on the table."
JPMorgan's enormous technology budget, disclosed for the first time recently, is eye-popping. Of the $105 billion in expenses JPMorgan projects for this year, tech should account for some $20 billion alone -- roughly the revenue of the rival Bank of New York Mellon -- driven in part by increased costs of software and investments in AI and machine learning.
Ellen Hazen, chief market strategist and portfolio manager at F.L.Putnam Investment Management, says she has been encouraged to hear about those plans in the name of growth.
"If you end up with technology being a differentiator within the banking universe, I have high confidence that JPMorgan will be one of the leaders -- at the expense of smaller banks that can't afford to make investments," says Hazen, whose firm owns 335,000 JPMorgan shares.
JPMorgan's investment bank is using that tech to hold on to clients. After losing some clients to rivals, the business, led by Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, created a tool to measure client interactions and notify bankers if clients need more attention. Investment bankers can now write an S-1 filing -- a key document companies must file before going public -- "agentically in a matter of hours, trained off of all the S-1s we've written in the past," Petno says. (Human beings are also in the mix.)
We also speak with Rohrbaugh, whose office is dotted with odes to Baltimore, his hometown. He talks about growing the business by offering increasingly sophisticated services, citing Marks & Spencer, the retailer in the United Kingdom, where he lived earlier in his career. Shoppers go there to buy everyday staples (milk) and fancy foodstuffs (caviar).
That amounts to hiring fewer junior bankers, which poses a challenge to training new bankers in what has been a classic apprenticeship model, one executive says. ( AI investment bankers are already making a splash.)
"More often than not, the basis of your relationship is the milk, bread, and butter," Rohrbaugh says. "It's foreign exchange, sovereign repo, swaps trading, Treasury trading. It's all of these things the client expects from us. But we have the ability to scale that up into higher-value services."
The sprawling consumer business is led by Marianne Lake, the odds-on favorite -- according, at least, to prediction markets -- to eventually replace Dimon. Consumer and community banking houses about 45% of the firm's workforce of 320,000 and counts some 5,000 branches, with 86.6 million individual customers and 7.4 million small businesses.
Asked whether she would accept the CEO job if she were offered it tomorrow, Lake, seated on the couch in her corner office, laughs. "It is unwise of me to spend huge amounts of time trying to answer that question." she says. "I love my job, I love this company. I love working on this team. The board has that to work out. I want to play my role in that, whatever that is. Honestly. That could be in a supporting-cast role, and I would be happy with that, too."
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