For years, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has built America’s biggest bank through expansion, cautious bets and crisis-era deals. However, the Wall Street veteran says he is ready to make another big move if the right opportunity comes along.
Dimon while speaking at financial conference in New York on Wednesday said, JPMorgan could spend as much as $20 billion on an acquisition over the next few years. “I do think there might be opportunities, and so we are on the lookout,” Dimon told analysts. “There might be, in the next couple years, a chance to put $10 [billion] or $20 billion to work buying something,” he added.
Dimon says acquisitions are not the main strategy
Even as he spoke about potential deals, Dimon made it clear that acquisitions are not his preferred route for growth. He warned that companies often start talking about mergers when they fail to grow naturally.
“You sit around a lot of management meetings, the first thing they do when they’re not doing well in organic growth is they start to bulls–t about [mergers and acquisitions],” Dimon said at the event.
“I don’t want to hear about M&A … What are you doing to grow your business — sales, branches, tech, profits, products, services?” Dimon said any future acquisition would need to fit smoothly into JPMorgan’s operations and culture. He stressed that the bank is not interested in flashy or unrealistic deals. “It can’t be just a pie-in-the-sky type of thing,” he said.
The bank’s biggest deals came during crises
Under Dimon’s leadership, JPMorgan has mostly expanded organically. Its largest acquisitions usually happened during moments of financial stress. The bank acquired First Republic Bank in 2023 in a deal backed by the FDIC. As part of the transaction, JPMorgan paid $10.6 billion to regulators.
Earlier, during the 2008 financial crisis, JPMorgan also bought Bear Stearns and the retail operations of Washington Mutual. The bank also spent years buying smaller fintech companies. However, its acquisition pace slowed after JPMorgan bought college financial aid startup Frank for $175 million in 2021. The startup was later found to be fraudulent.
AI hiring rises as traditional banking jobs shrink
Dimon’s comments on acquisitions come at a time when banks are changing their workforce because of artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, while speaking at JPMorgan’s China Summit in Shanghai, Dimon said the bank would hire more AI specialists while cutting hiring in some traditional banking roles.
“There will be all different types of jobs, and I think we will be hiring more AI people and fewer bankers in certain categories, and it will make them more productive,” he said. “I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” he added.
JPMorgan, which has more than 300,000 employees worldwide, is already preparing for that shift. According to Dimon, the bank’s yearly attrition rate of around 10 per cent that is roughly 25,000 to 30,000 employees leaving every year will help it slowly manage workforce changes without major layoffs.
Instead of mass job cuts, the bank plans to focus on retraining employees, moving workers into different roles and encouraging early retirement where needed. Banks are increasingly using AI for customer support, fraud detection, compliance work, coding assistance and back-office operations that once required large teams of employees.
Other banks are also cutting jobs
The change towards automation is already affecting the banking industry. Standard Chartered recently announced plans to cut around 7,000 jobs over the next four years while increasing investments in technology and automation. Chief executive Bill Winters said the bank was replacing “lower-value human capital” with technology and investment spending. Dimon later said Winters had expressed the idea in “an inartful way”, adding that “all of us say something incorrectly”. At HSBC, chief executive Georges Elhedery also recently warned employees not to resist the bank’s AI plans. “We all know generative AI will destroy certain jobs and will create new jobs,” Elhedery said.