JPMorgan Chase CEO wraps summer tour in Bentonville

Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of New York-based JPMorgan Chase & Co., met Thursday (Aug. 8) with Chase bank staff in Bentonville during his summer bus tour across the central United States. The Bentonville visit might include a trail walk.

Chase bank, the largest U.S. bank by assets, is the consumer banking division of JPMorgan Chase. Since Dimon joined the company in the 2004 merger with Bank One, Chase has grown from branches in four states, mostly in the Northeast and Texas, to become the first bank to have branches in the contiguous 48 states.

In an interview with area reporters, Dimon said the bank is the only one to have branches in the lower 48 states and explained the success of expansion while taking care of its existing customers. He was leading Bank One at the time of the merger, and it had branches in about 20 states.

Asked about Chase bank’s success amid expansion, he said the priority was to make the businesses run better, including products, services, systems and branches. This included refurbishing and opening branches.

“Once you get a cadence about how you should be doing that, it’s like a Walmart,” Dimon said. “You open one, and you open two. You open a third, and you kind of know what you’re doing. You get better at it over time. You get better at location. You get better at design. You get better at training. You get better at technology.

“I’m always a believer everything you do is for the long run,” he added. “I’ve never worried about the short run.”

BRANCH EXPANSION
In 2021, Chase opened its first Arkansas branch and, more recently, branches in Fayetteville, Springdale and Bentonville. By the end of 2025, Chase is expected to have 11 Arkansas locations, opening one more in Little Rock, an additional Fayetteville location and one in Rogers. Chase has eight Arkansas branches.

Dimon noted in his recent shareholders letter plans to build an additional 500 branches and hire 3,500 employees over the next three years as part of a multibillion-dollar investment in its branch network. Over the past five years, Chase has added more than 650 branches, including 400 locations in 25 new states. When the expansion is completed, Chase will have added more than 1,100 branches and hired more than 10,500 employees to its bank team since 2018.

Dimon said the company offers credit cards, mortgages, auto lending and wealth management. It also provides small-business lending in its branches, but that’s not always done in branches. He said that service offerings such as credit cards and private banking aren’t always done in branches, but wealthy clients like the option of depositing cash or checks at a branch. It also offers programs to support communities, such as philanthropy, hiring and work skills.

“We become part of the state, and in every state with the full force of JPMorgan,” Dimon said. “When we bank a company like a lot of the companies here, we’re not just banking them here. We have people working their account… in Walmart, probably 20-30 countries. There’s a lot of people outside of Arkansas who are helping Arkansas businesses.”

Dimon said entering a new state allows the company to do government business, including the state, municipal, hospital and roads.

“We now can do here, and we do,” he said. “So, we become embedded in the state by dealing with the governments here, too.”

PAST BENTONVILLE VISIT
In 2022, Dimon attended the Heartland Summit in downtown Bentonville and visited with Walmart CEO Doug McMillon. Heartland Summit is an invitation-only event hosted annually by Heartland Forward, a nonpartisan think tank in Bentonville. Then, he had walked the trails, and Dimon said he would try to walk them again tomorrow morning before returning home.

“I think it’s great,” he said. “I had lunch with Doug McMillon at his favorite place right in the square. It’s beautiful…I said it looks a little bit like Pleasantville. And you can see the expansion of the town…Arkansas, they’ve done a great job. That’s where good business can help boom a whole economy…”

Dimon said McMillon drove him around the construction site of the new home office that will comprise about 2.5 million square feet on about 300 acres and have between 12,000 and 13,000 people. He said JPMorgan Chase is working on a new building in New York that goes straight up and is 2.5 million square feet on about 1 acre. It will have about 14,000 people.

SOFT LANDING CHANCES
On Wednesday, Dimon told CNBC the odds of a soft landing for the U.S. economy were 35%-40%. Asked to follow up on that on Thursday, he expressed his dislike of economic forecasting.

“I think it’s a waste of time,” he said. “What I do look at to manage risk: It’s not a waste of time to think about what is the broad range of outcomes that are possible. No one knows the outcome, but I think you challenge yourself more when you say what’s the range of outcomes and then assign probabilities to those outcomes.”

He said he was asked whether he changed his mind regarding the market pricing in a 70% chance of a soft landing.

“By that, it means stocks are high, and credit spreads are low. If you kind of apply math to that, it looks like a 70% chance. I always thought it half of that.”

He said the odds are still about 35% for a soft landing.

“Don’t overreact to short-term stimulus,” he added. “There are factors that drive an economy. Some are absolutely impossible to see, like confidence level. Even when consumers say confidence, not confidence, it depends where it is in the spectrum, and did they change their behavior because of it.”

Asked about the large market swings this week and what it might be saying about the U.S. economy over the next two or three quarters, Dimon said, “I don’t think the market is telling you anything. I think the market is a function of millions of market players making decisions, making changes, and if you look at major inflection points, the market got that wrong…every single time.”

In his shareholders letter, Dimon noted the purchase of First Republic Bank “brought much-need stability to the U.S. banking system while allowing us to give a new, secure home to over half a million First Republic customers.”

He said this was a “minor financial crisis” with three bank failures, but if it had not been fixed, people would have looked to the next failure. He said it could have ended without the purchase, and someone else could’ve done it. He didn’t want to “claim total credit for it.” He noted that amid a recession and higher rates, this could lead to “stress in the system again.”

Still, “I think the big banks are in very good financial position,” he said. “But when there are problems in the economy, banks are like the canary in the coal mine. They are going to feel it. It might be very regional. It might be very specific to a new financial product. It might be very specific to an industry…Years ago, the oil industry collapsed in the late 1980s, and all the major oil banks basically didn’t make it…But the best protection is capital, liquidity, response, knowledge, detailed disincline…We have all those things. We are in very good shape.”

As of March 31, the most recent Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. report, Chase bank had total assets of $3.5 trillion and 4,921 domestic branches and 32 foreign branches. The second-largest U.S. bank by assets, North Carolina-based Bank of America had total assets of $2.55 trillion and 3,744 domestic branches and 23 foreign branches, according to the most recent FDIC report.