Farewell to the $25bn man? JP Morgan faces up to life after Jamie Dimon

Every working day, Jamie Dimon starts with the same routine. He wakes at about 5am, reads five newspapers — always in the same order — and then exercises before heading to his office in midtown New York.
Once there, the chief executive and chairman of JP Morgan takes the lift to the 41st floor, where he has a suite of rooms from which he runs America’s biggest bank, with operations in 100 countries and more than 250,000 staff.
Just a stone’s throw away, the bank’s new head office is being constructed. The 60-storey skyscraper will have the highest occupied floor in New York, with 360-degree views of the city. The top 300ft will light up, allowing Dimon, a self-described “red-blooded, full-throated” patriot, to shine the stars and stripes of America’s flag across the city.
When the building opens next year, it will be the most visible legacy bequeathed to JP Morgan by Dimon, 68, arguably the most powerful banker in the world. Now, with reports emerging that he privately favours Kamala Harris, and would be willing to serve as US Treasury secretary should the Democratic nominee triumph in this week’s presidential election, rumours are swirling again about who might succeed Dimon after his 19 years running the bank.
A person close to Dimon played down the prospect of him heading to Washington. Nevertheless, Wall Street is nervous. Such is Dimon’s importance to JP Morgan that the veteran banking analyst Mike Mayo has dubbed him the $25 billion man. “That’s how much the stock would drop if he were to leave tomorrow,” Mayo said.
JP Morgan’s “rock star line-up” of bankers — as one investor described them — are now jostling for position to jump into the biggest shoes on Wall Street. Two clear favourites have emerged: Marianne Lake, a Brit, and Jennifer Piepszak.
Yet, in interviews with more than a dozen current and former executives at the bank, plus investors and analysts, it is clear that many wonder how the bank built by Dimon can be run so successfully without him. His particular style — which blends ruthlessness and easy charm — plus his diplomatic acumen and political connections will be impossible to recreate in one person. After all, Dimon’s influence extends beyond the financial world into a power base that extends from Washington to Beijing.
As one senior JP Morgan banker said: “Many of us are worried about what comes next. He’s such a huge figure, and no matter who follows him, he’ll be an impossible act to follow.”
So, how has Dimon created such an influential bank? And who will succeed him?
The Harvard graduate joined JP Morgan 20 years ago when the Wall Street giant bought Bank One, the domestic bank he was running. Within 18 months, Dimon was in charge of the enlarged company and quickly grappling with the 2008 banking crisis.
Unlike rivals, who lost their jobs and reputations, Dimon thrived. His mantra was “fortress balance sheet” — a focus on financial strength — and he was called upon that year to rescue the stricken investment bank Bear Stearns and savings group Washington Mutual. He quickly became a household name in America. As Mayo put it: “How many CEOs are known by their first name? Jamie will take care of it, that’s the thinking.”
That proved to be the case again last year when First Republic Bank was on the brink and JP Morgan ended up buying almost all its assets. Dimon was clear why: the American government asked the banks to “step up”, he said, “and we did”.
JP Morgan now has $3.9 trillion (£3 trillion) in assets — bigger than Britain’s entire economy — and a stock market value of over $630 billion — more than three times the size of Britain’s most valuable company, the drugs giant AstraZeneca.
An amalgam of investment banking, wealth management and high street banking, mainly through its Chase brand, it is called on to advise governments, big companies and individuals on their finances. In Britain, it employs 22,000 people in London, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bournemouth, where it is the largest private sector employer.
Tim Piechowski, portfolio manager at Alpine Capital Research, which owns shares in JP Morgan, said its size and importance on the international stage presented a key challenge for Dimon’s successor: “They will need an ability to navigate both the political and social environment in the US, and on a global basis, to reinforce that JP Morgan has a licence to operate.”
Dimon has had the skill to pull this off, said Mayo, because he is “ a personality-driven CEO”. One senior former colleague describes his intimate knowledge of every part of this sprawling bank as being like a yachtsman who has spent his life on a ship. “He knows what every vibration on every rope means. He can feel it in his palms, in his fingers. There’s nobody else in that bank who can do that.”
Inevitably, speculation about his successor is intense. Two names repeatedly come up in this context. Both are women. Both are said to be friends.
One is Marianne Lake, who was born in America but grew up in Britain. She shot to prominence in 2012 when she was the bank’s finance director during the crisis involving the “London Whale”, the nickname of London-based JP Morgan trader Bruno Iksil, who amassed losses of more than $6 billion from his outsized trading positions. She equipped herself well when Dimon was under the most intense pressure of his tenure, and he later promoted her to run the consumer bank.
The other is the American Jennifer (known as Jenn) Piepszak, who ran the consumer bank with Lake before going on to become finance director. She is now the co-head of the investment bank.
Other names doing the rounds inside the bank are Troy Rohrbaugh, recently promoted to become Piepszak’s co-head at the investment bank, and Mary Erdoes, who runs asset and wealth management. But, reckoned Mayo: “All roads lead to Lake and Piepszak.”
Investors and staff members alike are beginning to take sides. Brian Mulberry, chief portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Research, which owns shares in the bank, said Piepszak was the “most prepared to lead the bank going forward”.
The “under a bus” substitute, Daniel Pinto, president and chief operating officer, is not regarded as a permanent replacement. He stepped up when Dimon was rushed into hospital for emergency heart treatment at the start of the pandemic in March 2020. He was also regarded as a key figure when Dimon had eight weeks’ treatment for throat cancer in 2014.
External candidates are rarely mentioned. The expectation that Dimon’s successor will come from within the ranks has mounted since April, with the bank’s admission, for the first time, that it was “spending significant time on developing operating committee members who are well known to shareholders as strong potential CEO candidates”.
But there are no certainties, and, as one executive at JP Morgan in London said: “Would you rather pick someone who’s your junior or someone who has been a CEO already? To run a bank with such a vast balance sheet, they need to have breadth [of experience], and some of the internal candidates don’t have that.”
• Meet Marianne Lake, the Brit lining up to take over from Dimon
Dimon was himself an outsider when he arrived at JP Morgan in 2004. In 1998, he was unceremoniously sacked by Citigroup after falling out with his mentor, the financier Sandy Weill. From being tipped as chief executive material for what was then the biggest bank in the world, he found himself out of work.
Two years later, Dimon joined the domestically focused Bank One as chief executive. JP Morgan and Bank One merged in 2004 and Dimon got the top job in December 2005.
Some who know him say that this rocky patch in his own career left him with a ruthless streak. Figures who have left suddenly include Bill Winters, who now runs FTSE 100 bank Standard Chartered, while Jes Staley, now fighting for his reputation as a result of his association with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, went on to run Barclays.
• Wall St is strangely relaxed over a second coming of Donald Trump
As one banker at JP Morgan said: “The tragic flaw of Jamie Dimon? Everyone loves working for him, and then the moment they get too close, or the moment they are mentioned in the press as potential successors, he shoots them.”
Others, though, note how supportive he is of those in his current top team.
Another said Dimon had never really regarded any of the high-profile figures who left as potential successors, with one exception: Michael Cavanagh, who departed in 2014 for a high-ranking position in private equity and is now president of the US media business Comcast. Those calling for an outsider to get the top job cite Cavanagh as a potential candidate, along with Wells Fargo’s Charlie Scharf and PNC Bank’s Bill Demchak.
So, how has Dimon been so successful as a manager of this vast enterprise? Those who have worked under him cite his willingness to empower his deputies, while also devoting enough of his time to assisting them where he can.
One former colleague said: “He made you feel like you were the CEO of your business and he was there to help you. Most days, he would call to ask how he could be helpful and which clients he could call. Then he would call them in the next four hours.
“He had this thing that from 8am to 6pm, he’d always keep five hours free, so if you called him in a crisis, he’d say: ‘OK let’s talk.’ ”
He would also be robust and clear in his communication with his teams. The banking analyst Mayo said: “Dimon enjoys and appreciates candour … he will always want to discuss your point of view. He’ll tell you why he’s right but he always wants to hear why he might be wrong.”
One former Dimon lieutenant said: “He’s not a bullshitter … He used to say, ‘There’s no loyalty in this company,’ meaning that if you stopped performing, you were out. No bank keeps people who are underperforming, but he’s the only one who says it like it is.”
Another at the bank added: “He’s so clear about what he wants you to do. Every big decision that was made about your [part of the] business, even if you couldn’t stand it, you knew why it was being done. He’d tell us, ‘We’re going to do a bunch of things you’ll hate’ — take away US Open [tennis] tickets, make you cut 30 per cent of your risk-weighted assets. But he would tell you why.”
Currently, Dimon is simultaneously JP Morgan’s chairman and its chief executive, an all-powerful position more common in America than Britain. This means he will have a crucial say in whoever replaces him when he eventually leaves. Most observers have 2026 marked as his eventual leaving date, because that is when a share award worth $75 million will pay out.
Dimon has mooted the idea of splitting the roles, so he could stay on as chairman for a couple of years to oversee his successor. While this might put off some potential bosses, fearful of a powerful back-seat driver, one senior executive at JP Morgan said: “The new CEO would rather have him there for two years or so, owning any mistakes that might crop up from his time there [and helping resolve them]. If the next person bombs, it’s on Jamie. He’ll be desperate for that person to be successful.”
Some investors said the biggest issue should be that the next chief executive does not make too many radical changes at a bank that has been so successful for so long. “It would be a big mistake if someone came in and said, ‘I need to put my stamp on the organisation.’ That’s not the way to go,” said Stephen Biggar, an analyst at New York-based Argus Research.
Crucially, that is demonstrated in the share price, which hit an all-time high last month. It values Dimon’s 8.6 million shares at almost $2 billion.
So, little wonder that he is concerned about the strength of the bank he will one day leave behind. Dimon told one interviewer: “I hope people say we’re gonna miss the son of a bitch when he’s gone and he made the world a better place and created opportunity.”
As well as always mentioning his family — his wife Judy, whom he met while studying at Harvard, and their three daughters — he asserts his patriotic credentials in almost every interview. Speculation swirls that the only thing that would make him leave JP Morgan suddenly would be a request to serve in the next US administration.If he does get that call, Wall Street might have to find a way to live without its $25 billion man.