- JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said he planned to stay at the bank for a “significant amount of time.”
- In May, the bank announced a leadership shake-up that hinted at Dimon’s succession plan.
- At a conference Monday, Dimon said he wouldn’t retire within the next three years.
- See more stories on Insider’s business page.
A recent leadership shake-up at JPMorgan doesn’t seem to have sped up the timeline for CEO Jamie Dimon’s retirement.
When Marianne Lake, the consumer-lending chief, and Chief Financial Officer Jennifer Piepszak were tapped in May to colead the firm’s massive consumer- and community-banking business, their promotions — as well as the announced retirement plans of Gordon Smith, the firm’s copresident, co-chief operating officer, and CEO of CCB — offered new clues about who was in the running to be JPMorgan’s next CEO.
But Dimon, the longest-running chief executive among the big US banks, doesn’t appear to be going anywhere anytime soon: He once again said that he was more than a few years out from retiring.
“I intend to stay, which is sanctioned by the board, for a significant amount of time. I think you put in your report several years. Significant means more than that,” Dimon told the Morgan Stanley analyst Betsy Grasek during Monday’s Morgan Stanley US Financials, Payments & CRE Conference.
When pressed by Grasek on whether “significant” meant at least five years, Dimon declined to give an exact time frame, saying that was up to JPMorgan’s board but that his retirement wouldn’t be during the next two to three years.
Succession planning at JPMorgan has long been a hot-button issue on Wall Street. Dimon, who has been the CEO since 2006, is 65 years old and had a health scare in 2020.
He’s also said on at least two occasions — first in 2018 and again in 2020 — that he was planning to step down from the CEO role in five years.
When he eventually hands over the reins, he said Monday that the firm would be in good hands and that there was a strong bench of top executives to choose from, including Lake, Piepszak, and Daniel Pinto, who will be JPMorgan’s sole president and chief operating officer when Smith retires at the end of this year. Dimon said the three were “exceptional.”
If either Lake or Piepszak were chosen as JPMorgan’s next CEO, that person would become the first woman to lead the bank and only the second in Wall Street’s history to land the top job, after Jane Fraser, who took over Citigroup earlier this year.
“We have a lot of people to choose from, and we have a ‘hit-by-a-bus’ plan,” Dimon said. “It may very well be a woman. But I just want to tell people: It will not be a woman because it’s a woman. It will be the person who’s best-suited for the job.”
Leave a Reply
Leave a Reply
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
