Mike Blake/Reuters
A recent leadership shakeup at JPMorgan doesn't seem to have sped up the timeline for CEO Jamie Dimon's eventual retirement.
When consumer-lending chief Marianne Lake and chief financial officer Jennifer Piepszak were tapped in late May to co-lead the firm's massive consumer and community banking business, their promotions — as well as the announced retirement plans of co-president, co-chief operating officer, and CEO of CCB Gordon Smith — 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's 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 Morgan Stanley analyst Betsy Grasek during Monday's Morgan Stanley US Financials conference.
When pressed by Grasek on whether "significant" meant at least five years, Dimon declined to give an exact timeframe, saying that was up to JPMorgan's board, but that his retirement won'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 CEO since 2006, is now 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 does eventually hand over the reigns, he said Monday that the firm will be in good hands and that there is a strong bench of top executives to choose from, including Lake, Piepszak, and Daniel Pinto, who will be JPMorgan's sole president and COO when Smith retires at the end of this year. Dimon said the three were "exceptional."
If either Lake or Piepszak are chosen as JPMorgan's next CEO, they would become the first woman to lead the bank and only the second in Wall Street's history after Jane Fraser 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."
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