Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase
David A. Grogan | CNBC
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has watched as a new breed of fintech players led by PayPal, Square and tech giants around the world have exponentially grown users and market value.
His message to the management team of his $ 3.4 trillion banking goliath: fear.
“Absolutely, we should be s — less afraid of that,” Dimon said on Friday during a conference call with analysts. “We have a lot of resources, a lot of very smart people. We just have to get faster, better, faster … If you look at what we’ve done, you’d say we’ve done a good job, but the other people have it. well done too. “
Dimon’s blunt assessment was in response to questions from analysts, including Wells Fargo’s Mike Mayo, who pointed out that fintech players with rich, tech-like valuations have “beat” traditional banks in recent years.
Dimon said he had sent his deputies a list of global competitors, and that PayPal, Square, Stripe, Ant Financial and US tech giants, including Amazon, Apple and Google, were names for the bank to monitor. The rivals in many cases are also clients of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment banking, he added.
Competition will be particularly tight in the payments world, he said, “I expect to see very, very tough and brutal competition for the next 10 years,” said Dimon. “I expect to win, so help me God.”
Dimon added that in some cases the new players were “examples of unfair competition” that the bank would eventually do something about. He included players taking advantage of richer debit card revenues for small banks and firms who accused Dimon of not taking precautions against money laundering.
He specifically mentioned Plaid, the payment start-up whose acquisition by Visa recently failed, and said “people who are misusing data given to them, like Plaid.”
Plaid CEO Zach Perret declined to comment directly on the accusation during an interview with CNBC’s David Faber, adding that Plaid is spending time with the bank for a partnership.
CNBC’s Dawn Giel contributed to the report.