Jamie Dimon, who turns 69 in March, will one day retire as chief executive officer of JPMorgan Chase & Co. The candidates to succeed him have been well advertised. Yet any slight change in the state of the race, like we saw Tuesday, unfailingly generates excitement and speculation about who, how and, most importantly, when the next leader will become known.
The latest development saw Jennifer Piepszak, co-head of the corporate and investment bank since last year, promoted to chief operating officer, taking over from Daniel Pinto, who plans to retire by the end of 2026 after more than four decades with the bank. Piepszak will become sole COO by the middle of this year, but Pinto will stay around to advise and consult with Dimon and the business heads for 18 months. Alas, Piepszak, 54, doesn’t want to be the bank’s next CEO. “Her clear preference is for a senior operating role working closely with Jamie and in support of top leadership going forward,” Bloomberg News reported spokesman Joe Evangelisti as saying.
Investors might gasp or fret that their preferred candidate is out of the running, and that the race to succeed Dimon has been upended. But there seems no cause for alarm. The plan remains the same; it’s just that one of the names on the succession list has changed.
To be honest, Piepszak was my pick for who would triumph. All the candidates are highly competent and experienced, most of them across several areas of the bank. But for me, Piepszak seemed the one who could most naturally hold a room while speaking and presenting. That might seem a superficial judgement, but such an ability remains a critical skill for a leader, even in an increasingly technology driven industry. JPMorgan still has more than 300,000 people working on its main-street branches across the US and offices around the world.
So why the immediate and public declaration that Peipszak had no interest in competing for Dimon’s seat? There was a danger that her promotion would lead people inside and outside the bank to assume Piepszak had sealed the deal as CEO-in-waiting. A wrong idea can cause problems, especially if it affects how bank staff related to Piepszak and the other candidates.
The leading contenders still in the race are Marianne Lake, CEO of the consumer bank and a former chief financial officer, and Troy Rohrbaugh, who became co-head of the investment bank with Piepszak last year and will continue in that role.Mary Erdoes, who has run JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management arm since 2009, is also on the list. Doug Petno, promoted alongside Rohrbaugh, also joins the race. To my mind, Erdoes’ experience is too narrow, and Petno’s candidacy comes too late in the race.
There are many that would surely like greater certainty sooner on who will be the one to lead what is arguably among the world’s most important financial institutions. Wells Fargo & Co. analyst Mike Mayo, who rarely fails to ask Dimon about his retirement plans, wrote that he was confused by the Piepszak news. “Succession has been a bit murky and this doesn’t change it much,” he wrote in a research note.
To be fair, there is a lot more clarity now around JPMorgan’s succession plans than in the past. At last May’s investor day, Dimon said unequivocally that the timetable for his handoff was no longer the evergreen five-years-plus he had long quoted. The smoothest version likely sees a successor named in the next two to three years, Dimon relinquishes the CEO seat but remains chairman (health and board approval permitting) and there’s an unhurried handover. Piepszak’s exit from the race doesn’t change the chances of that being the case.
So, who has the inside track? The skills to conjure with in this guessing game are strategic vision and an incredibly strong nose for risk, that much is obvious. I’d say the clincher, from various things I’ve heard Dimon say over the years, will be which candidate has the character to win hearts and minds, as the saying goes. That can be a hard thing to judge, especially from a distance, but Dimon and the board will have their views. They might already have a clear idea. The race looks a tad tighter, but it doesn’t need to be rushed.
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