At a gathering of his top executives in South Florida in 2022, JPMorgan Chase president Daniel Pinto reflected on the preceding decade. When he turned to what the decade ahead would bring for the US lender, he told his troops that he wouldn’t be there to see the end of it.
Neither, it turned out, would many of his protégés.
A reshuffle this year of JPMorgan’s top leaders by chief executive Jamie Dimon has sparked a number of high-profile departures of executives close to Pinto — and fed speculation about whether Pinto’s own exit may be finally approaching.
The disagreements point to the stresses and internal politicking in the latest chapter of the long-running search for an eventual successor to Dimon, who has led the Wall Street bank since 2006. How they are resolved could determine control of one of Wall Street’s most powerful companies, the largest US bank with more than $4tn in assets.
The 61-year-old Pinto has been one of JPMorgan’s most influential executives. He has served as president for six years and helped run the bank when Dimon, now 68, underwent emergency heart surgery in 2020.
Under the reorganisation, Pinto kept his role as president but ceded his title as head of the investment banking and trading division — an expected change which created room for the next generation of bankers who could one day replace Dimon.
But in the new structure — which also involved merging investment banking and trading with commercial banking — top jobs went to Jennifer Piepszak, Troy Rohrbaugh and Doug Petno, instead of candidates favoured by Pinto, people familiar with the matter said, such as Marc Badrichani, Takis Georgakopoulos and Viswas Raghavan.
JPMorgan had seriously considered an alternate organisational structure that would have granted bigger roles to Badrichani, Georgakopoulos and Raghavan but this idea was ultimately scrapped, according to people familiar with the matter.
Badrichani, Georgakopoulos and Raghavan have all since left the bank.
“A lot of his power base has been dismantled,” said one JPMorgan executive of Pinto.
JPMorgan declined to comment.
The job moves challenged the view within the bank that a small group of executives who enjoyed Pinto’s support was in the ascendancy and being lined up for senior positions.
Some of Pinto’s protégés had ruffled feathers internally by encroaching on other parts of JPMorgan’s business. This included a push by Georgakopoulos, who was the bank’s head of payments, to develop a payments product that frustrated parts of JPMorgan’s consumer business.
“That was Daniel’s guy,” said a former JPMorgan executive of Georgakopoulos. “Him leaving is like sending a message.”
Pinto’s status within the bank has been emblematic of JPMorgan’s cultivation of an international roster of executives. But current and former JPMorgan employees also noted that many of the promotions were given to American bankers over colleagues such as Georgakopoulos and Raghavan.
An Argentine veteran of the 1982 Falklands war who joined Manufacturers Hanover in Buenos Aires in 1983 before the deals that made it part of JPMorgan Chase, Pinto is an unlikely president of the New York bank. After starting out as a foreign exchange trader, he became co-head of JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank in 2012, and sole head two years later.
Pinto was a longtime London resident, moving to the UK capital in 1996. He did not relocate to JPMorgan’s New York headquarters until 2021 when he was made its sole president following the retirement of co-president Gordon Smith.
Pinto’s path endeared him to bankers outside JPMorgan’s Manhattan base and he championed many people like Raghavan who rose through the ranks in Europe.
Dimon has been effusive in his praise of Pinto. At an investor event two years ago, he said he was “blessed” to have Pinto by his side “with his extraordinary brain”. Insiders view Pinto as the key to much of the bank’s day-to-day operations, as Dimon pursues a relentless travel schedule.
If Pinto stays until December 2026, he stands to earn a retention bonus expected to be worth about $25mn. The fallout from this year’s job moves has fed speculation inside JPMorgan that Pinto may leave sooner, though a person familiar with his thinking said he had no immediate plans to retire.
According to people familiar with the matter, Pinto had pushed for Georgakopoulos and trading co-head Badrichani to hold senior positions in the investment banking and trading division alongside Dimon’s choice of Piepszak, a leading contender in the CEO succession race.
Dimon ultimately selected Rohrbaugh, who ran trading alongside Badrichani, to lead the business with Piepszak.
Pinto had also championed Raghavan, one of JPMorgan’s top investment bankers. The two men had neighbouring parking spaces at JPMorgan’s Canary Wharf office where they would both leave their Aston Martins.
When it came time to select the co-heads of a newly combined investment banking and commercial banking group, however, Raghavan was not picked.
Instead, Dimon picked an executive with who Pinto had clashed in the past, Petno, and Filippo Gori to run the group, reporting to Piepszak and Rohrbaugh.
Raghavan quit in February for a top role at rival Citigroup. The personnel moves established Piepszak, Rohrbaugh and Marianne Lake, who leads the bank’s Chase consumer business, as the main candidates to succeed Dimon.
Dimon is one of the industry’s longest-serving leaders. He said recently that the timetable for his departure as CEO is less than five years.
In an interview with CNBC last week, Dimon referred to Pinto as his designated successor if he were to be “hit by a bus”.
“But even when I’m done with CEO, I might be chairman for a year or two,” he said. “So I have a while to go before I’m out of the company.”
Additional reporting by Stephen Gandel in New York
