JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon Hints at Potential Successors

5 'Extremely' Qualified Candidates to Succeed Jamie Dimon as JPMorgan's Next CEO

Jamie Dimon recently said finding a successor is among his most important tasks right now. Jamie Dimon, who has served as the CEO of JPMorgan Chase (JPM) since 2005, said at an event in New York that looking for his successor is among his most important tasks right now. The comment came after the banking executive said during a company event in May that his retirement "timetable isn't five years anymore," backtracking from his standard answer to previous such questions that his retirement was perpetually five years away. Sign Up For Our Daily Newsletter Sign Up Thank you for signing up! By clicking submit, you agree to our <a href="http://observermedia.com/terms">terms of service</a> and acknowledge we may use your information to send you emails, product samples, and promotions on this website and other properties. You can opt out anytime. See all of our newsletters That said, Dimon, 68, is in no rush to step down just yet. In 2021, JPMorgan's board paid him a generous stock bonus to keep him on the job for a "significant number of years." Dimon, who has also served as the bank's board chairman since 2007, has said he expects to remain on the board even after he steps down as CEO. While Dimon's retirement date is yet to be announced, here are five promising candidates whom the sitting CEO deems as "extremely" qualified for the job: Daniel Pinto Daniel Pinto is currently president and chief operating officer of JPMorgan Chase. He is already Dimon's "hit-by-a-bus" pick for the top job, promising Pinto is ready to take the helm if something were to happen to Dimon. In 2020, when Dimon was undergoing critical heart surgery, Pinto temporarily stepped in his shoes and helped navigate the bank through the pandemic. Last week, Dimon told investors in Brooklyn that Pinto "could run the bank tomorrow." With an annual compensation package of approximately $30 million, Pinto is the second highest-paid executive at JPMorgan, behind Dimon. (Dimon's pay was $36 million) Pinto has spent his entire career at JP Morgan and its predecessor companies. In 1983, he joined Manufacturers Hanover, a bank later merged with Chemical Bank and then Chase Manhattan, which eventually merged with JP Morgan in 2000 to form JPMorgan Chase. In 2014, Pinto became the CEO of JPMorgan's corporate and investment bank division. He was promoted to co-president and chief operating officer of the bank in 2018 and became the sole president in 2022. Pinto is credited for modernizing JPMorgan's technology. Last week, he unveiled an internal A.I. assistant for the bank's 140,000 employees to enhance productivity. Pinto also led the development of JPMorgan's e-trading and mobile technologies, which now process $5 trillion in transactions a day. However, Pinto is 61 years old, and some suspect he may exit the bank soon. In August, Dimon's reshuffling of senior leaders led a few top executives close to Pinto to resign. During the reshuffling, Pinto gave up his role as head of investment banking and trading while remaining as president, and rising talent was given top jobs. Pinto's current compensation plan includes a retention bonus if he remains at the bank until the end of 2026. Jennifer Piepszak Jennifer Piepszak, currently co-CEO of JPMorgan's commercial and investment bank (CIB) division, has spent 30 years with the firm, rising through leadership roles across various divisions. Piepszak's diverse experience includes co-leading the consumer and community banking division from 2021 to 2023, where she led the bank's business, serving nearly 80 million U.S. consumers and 6 million small businesses. Prior to that, she served as CFO from 2019 to 2021. However, Piepszak has often shared the spotlight in her top jobs. She led the consumer and community banking division with Marianne Lake and currently heads the commercial and investment bank division alongside Troy Rohrbaugh (both among Observer's top five picks). In 2023, Forbes recognized both Piepszak and Lake as two of the most powerful women in the world. Though sharing her current role with Rohrbaugh, the promotion gives Piepszak increased responsibility at the firm. "The expansion of Jennifer Piepszak's role in commercial banking and investment banking gives her an edge in the succession planning," Stephen Biggar, a banking analyst at Argus Research, told Reuters in January. Troy Rohrbaugh Prior to his promotion to co-CEO of JPMorgan's CIB division earlier this year, Troy Rohrbaugh made his name within the bank leading markets and securities services. He also ran the bank's macro market products. Rohrbaugh joined JPMorgan in 2005 as a managing director and global head of foreign exchange derivatives. He was lauded as a "source of stability not just for JPMorgan but also for the broader FX industry during its most turbulent years," as per Euromoney. Rohrbaugh worked under Pinto for most of his career, giving him unique access to Dimon. Pinto also advocated for Rohrbaugh's promotion during this year's executive reshuffling. However, further promotions for Rohrbaugh may hinge on whether he's able to turn around JPMorgan's CIB business from a year of unusually slow deal flow. Marianne Lake Marianne Lake now runs JPMorgan's consumer and community banking division by herself after years of co-leading it with Piepszak, giving her a unique opportunity to flaunt her leadership skills. Like Piepszak, Lake previously served as CFO from 2013 to 2019. In April 2019, she was promoted to CEO of JPMorgan's consumer lending business. Goldman Sachs' banking analyst Richard Ramsden described her as "probably one of the most gifted CFOs around." Lake has long been speculated as a potential successor to Dimon. A JPMorgan executive told Reuters anonymously in 2018, "I would put my money on her above anybody else" as Dimon's most likely successor. Lake has also spoken openly about having three children by surrogate in hopes to break the stigma and inspire other women. She is the co-founder of Women on the Move, a JPMorgan effort to improve financial equity for women. Mary Callahan Erdoes Mary Callahan Erdoes has served as the CEO of JPMorgan's asset management division since 2009, overseeing $5 trillion in assets under management. She is also JPMorgan's third largest individual shareholder, per Forbes, after Dimon and Pinto, contributing to her net worth of $300 million. Under her leadership, JPMorgan's asset management division attracted record highs of $490 billion in inflows in 2023, generating $5 billion of net income. Erdoes has spent 25 years at JPMorgan and is often hailed as one of the most powerful women on Wall Street. Dimon described Erdoes' management style as "an iron fist in a velvet glove."

Jamie Dimon's right hand man has spent 24 years preparing to take over for his boss. He's still waiting

For 24-years Daniel Pinto commuted from his home in London to New York, the headquarters of JPMorgan Chase & Co., where he is president. "Jamie's fine with it," he told Brunswick Group in 2019, referring to his boss and mentor Jamie Dimon, who has been CEO of the bank since 2006, and has grown it to one of the most powerful financial institutions in history, with $4.1 trillion in assets. "I love my job," he told Brunswick. "And I love living in London." Then, in March 2020, a heart attack and emergency heart surgery sidelined Dimon, and Pinto and Gordon Smith (JPMorgan's head of the consumer business) took over the reins, successfully steering the company through the first months of Covid and the global financial crisis that followed. It was a pivotal moment in Pinto's career. He became the face of the company during that stint, and has since been a regular on lists of who is most likely to succeed Dimon. Though Pinto has long brushed off whispers of him becoming the next CEO of JPMorgan, it's hard not to note he finally relocated to New York two years ago, and has been living there with his wife ever since. Last month Dimon named Pinto his "hit-by-a-bus" replacement, and at a meeting in Brooklyn last week, he told a room of investors Pinto "could run the bank tomorrow." That same day, just across the East River in Manhattan, Pinto, whose $30 million compensation is the second-highest at JPMorgan (Dimon's is $36 million) told an audience of bankers, "I'm working with Jamie during the day to day, and focused in all these areas, including technology, including artificial intelligence, every part of the company, to make sure the company that is performing very, very well continues on the same path." But just as a talented back-up quarterback can spend the prime of their career waiting for a star to leave the field, executives can likewise miss their window if the boss upstairs sticks around for too long. Now 61-years-old, Pinto is seen in some circles as too old for the job. Dimon was only 49 years old when he took over the helm. Adding to the intrigue, Dimon identified Pinto as "a key executive who is immediately ready to fulfill the responsibilities of the CEO" in the same letter to investors that identified newly promoted Jennifer Piepszak, Troy Rohrbaugh, Marianne Lake and Mary Erdoes as "strong potential CEO candidates." One report, which a long-time colleague of Pinto disputes, argued the repositioning passed over some of Pinto's closest colleagues, eroding Pinto's influence. Of the three executives identified as Pinto favorites, none are still with the company. So for now, Pinto occupies a strange place in one of Corporate America's most powerful C-suites: He's the CEO-in-waiting, who might be waiting forever. Born in Argentina in December 1962, Pinto grew up amid hyperinflation measured not in years, but hours. As he was finishing high school in 1982, the Falklands War broke out as Argentina and the United Kingdom fought for ownership of several strategically important islands. Having just turned 18 he was drafted into the military and trained as a soldier, though a source who knows Pinto says he never actually fought in the war. Even while serving in the military Pinto enrolled at the Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora in Buenos Aires. When the war ended in June of 1982 he took a job as a financial analyst and foreign exchange trader at bank holding conglomerate Manufacturers Hanover where he worked his way through school, eventually earning a bachelor's degree in public accounting and business administration. He was 19 years old when he took the job, and never really left. The same year New York-based Chemical Bank bought Manufacturers Hanover, in 1992, Pinto was appointed head of sales for the acquiring company. "Clearly, at that time, I didn't imagine that job was going to lead me here," he told Brunswick. He worked his way up to head trader and eventually treasurer of Chemical Bank in Mexico, where he and his wife moved. Then, in 1996, Chemical Bank bought JP Morgan, adopting the former's better-known name. Pinto moved to London to oversee local markets in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia for JPMorgan's retail bank, Chase Manhattan, briefly leaving his family behind while he got them settled in their new home. The strain of speaking English in a new country left him exhausted at the end of every week. "It was really, really tough," he said. "But after adapting, I loved it." The change of location kicked off more than two decades of rapidly moving through the highest echelons of JPMorgan's executive team. In 1998 he helped the bank manage the volatile markets of the Russian Financial Crisis that saw the ruble devalued and the nation default on its debt. In 2006 he was promoted to JPMorgan's global head of emerging markets and two years later added the duties of the head of the global credit trading and syndicate business. When JPMorgan bought Bear Sterns in 2008 amid the fall-out surrounding the Great Recession, Pinto briefly served as a director helping manage the integration and wind-down of the company. By 2009 he was at last initiated into JPMorgan's unofficial training program, which promotes executives to a shared leadership role where they vie for senior roles. That year he became co-head of the global fixed income group for the investment bank, then the sole head. In 2012 he became the co-CEO of the Corporate & Investment Bank, then two years later the sole CEO. In 2018 he was named co-president, along with Gordon Smith, and chief operating officer of JPMorgan, where he first started working closely with Jamie Dimon. But before he could be promoted to sole president of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon had a heart attack. It was the spring of 2020 and whispers about Covid, then known as the 2019 novel coronavirus, were quickly spreading around the world. As Dimon was rushed to emergency surgery, Pinto and Smith were given control. During their few months in charge, the pair made the controversial decision to let bank staff work from home. They also transacted $11 trillion of payments a day, according to a letter Pinto sent to investors, and over one two-month period helped clients raise $940 billion. By the time Dimon returned, Pinto, whose staff declined to comment for this story, had learned a valuable lesson about leading the bank. In April 2021 he told Bloomberg the experience taught him that during stressful times "you need to be supported to be able to make strong decisions -- in some cases, different to what other companies of other people are doing. You really need to be able to execute relentlessly and move the company forward." Though Pinto should have been in high spirits after successfully helping lead the company, the same April he spoke about his lessons learned, he became embroiled in one of the most difficult deals of his career. He had greenlit a €3.25 billion loan to help build the much maligned Super League of European football, which sought to unite the continent's myriad leagues. Three days later the deal was dead following outrage from Prince William and the Prime Ministers of France and Italy who didn't want to see their favorite leagues destroyed. "It is clear we misjudged the magnitude of feeling that this deal would create," Pinto told Bloomberg. "And we will learn from this experience." The following year, in January 2022, Pinto became JPMorgan's sole president. Before the year was over, he received 750,000 restricted stock options, then worth $25 million -- if he stayed on until 2031. Complicating questions around succession though, Dimon will receive twice that if he stays on until the same year, something which is exceedingly unlikely. In an interview earlier this year at the AllianceBernstein Strategic Decisions conference Dimon said he'd step down in fewer than five years, leaving Pinto to vie for the position against a wave of younger execs now also being mentored. It's possible Dimon could stay on as chairman to continue that mentorship, and to earn that extra payout.