JPMorgan Chase & Co. will soon start offering digital consumer banking in Germany and aims to become one of the country’s largest banks, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said.
(Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. will soon start offering digital consumer banking in Germany and aims to become one of the country’s largest banks, Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon said.
JPMorgan has been hiring in Berlin as part of the effort and intends for the German capital to be its base for consumer operations in the European Union, Dimon said in an interview with Handelsblatt, confirming a Bloomberg News report earlier this year.
US banks traditionally served EU corporate clients from bases in London, yet the 2016 Brexit referendum forced them to move hundreds of billions of dollars of assets and hire locally to retain access to the bloc. That major shift also poses a challenge to domestic banks as sophisticated US competitors bulk up in their backyard.
JPMorgan wants its European unit in Frankfurt to become a top three bank in Germany, Dimon said in the interview. The unit, JP Morgan SE, currently has €436 billion ($485 billion) in assets on its balance sheet, making it the fifth largest lender in the country by that measure, Handelsblatt said.
JPMorgan has long eschewed the costly, branch-heavy approach that its rivals Citigroup Inc. and HSBC Holdings Plc used as they expanded overseas in decades past. That restraint proved prescient as the rise of fintech apps in recent years changed the calculus for JPMorgan’s international consumer efforts.
Now, JPMorgan is one of the few big US banks expanding its consumer presence internationally. Citigroup is in the process of selling off more than a dozen retail units around the world. Goldman Sachs Group Inc. has also said its pulling back in consumer banking, which included a UK offering.
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