HIGHLIGHTS: Jamie Dimon - CEO of JPMorgan Chase

0:01Hi everybody, tune in to this short version of the podcast which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everyone, I'm Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian Soren Wealth Fund. Today I'm in really good company because I'm here with the one and only Jamie Dimon. He runs the largest bank in the world, 20 years at the helm, and his annual shareholder letters are mandatory reading for everybody in the financial sector. We recorded this live on stage at our investment conference in Oslo. We are proud investors in JP Morgan. Jamie, welcome to In Good Company.

0:46The first question has to be, what is the culture that has made you able to be so successful now after 200 years? First of all, welcome everybody. Thrilled to be here. He is persistent, by the way. When he asked me about, like, I come in 2025, I said, I can't. He said, what about this date in 2026? So here I am. I am thrilled to be here. It's wonderful. Cultures are, my whole life I was always cautious about when you talk about culture because you can say words, a lot of companies say employees, customers, and they don't mean it. So the real way you develop a culture is you're just driving it with grit and courage, like every meeting, everything you do, every trip you make, Every person you hire, every person you fire, it really is about doing the right thing for the customer eventually.

1:33Obviously, do they got to take care of your employee? A lot of cultures on Wall Street, as you know, it was about money. How much money can someone make? And some of the things in Wall Street are built on their compensation schemes. They're not serve a client scheme. And so I've just been relentless. When we first did the J.P. Morgan Bank One merger in 2004, I had a book on how we do business and Bill Harrison, who was the chairman at the time, said you gotta send it out. I was like, no, let's do it first. Let's let people experience the detail, the diligence, the fortress balance sheet, all these things.

2:07The follow up, the open meetings, that you have to speak up. It's not even a choice, hopefully. So if you do that, you just drive a certain type of culture. How do you stop bureaucracy from creeping into the organization? Because you're now a huge organization, right? Yeah.

2:25I really believe this. Bureaucracy, complacency, and arrogance will take down a company. Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else. And you could be a small company and have it. You could be a big company and have it. You can have it in your branch. You cannot have it in the other branch. And it's always the manager's stupid. I mean, almost always. The way you fight it is, with me, all the information is shared beforehand. So there's known secret. I remember going to companies and this wouldn't share that part of the company. If it isn't shared properly, I generally just cancel the meeting.

3:00If someone comes in and says, Nikolai wants X and I don't believe that's right, I say, well, why did you wait for this meeting to do that? Go talk to him.

3:10Everything, no matter how small, get on the road, go see clients. Clients are a gift because they're demanding they should be, but they also tell you, in our case, what our competitors are doing better. Why we didn't get something. If we don't do this in that country, you're not going to give us a big piece of business because how important it is for you. And I uniquely know it might cost$30 million to build a payment system to go up to a country. But it's easy to say, well, we're going to do it now. I just found out why the staff isn't doing it. So when you have a meeting, people often don't know who's running it.

3:44That's a mistake. When you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying, that was a great meeting. We'll pick it up again next week. It's usually a bad meeting. The meeting should end with, okay, David, you're going to do X. Talk to these people. Not hierarchical. It's just you could, you know, cut across the company. You talk to HR. You know, consumers got the most people. This change in their program is going to affect, you know, their branches. Talk about it. Come back. Make a recommendation. I always ask, if you're king for today, what are you going to do? Because people walk in and they admire a problem.

4:13If you ask them what they're going to do, they say, well, I look at this. I say, no, no. What would you do? And honestly, for a lot of people, it's just almost crippling to try to answer that question. And so have the right people in the room. Very often people are making decisions. Like people think you go back to your office and you think. No, usually you iterate over and over and over and it gets you to the right place. Why should you speak? If you don't have the right people in the room, it will not happen. What are the risks you are most concerned about just now? Oh, cyber. there's two cyber because of mythos which i assume a lot of you guys have read about but the bad guys can use cyber and they're gonna get stronger and more powerful in terms of finding vulnerabilities it's been written about you really should read it uh and then uh and then geopolitics so i'm not i'm not worried about the u.s i don't worry about the u.s economy you know the economy is like the weather it's going to get better it's going to get people talk about all the time did you bring your but it's not the most the most significant thing for The future of the free world, free and democratic world, is the geopolitics.

5:16And which part of the geopolitics? I'd say the wars in Ukraine, Iran, our relationship, that NATO has to stay strong, that we need to work with our trading partners to keep the Western world together. I think the worst thing we can do is fragment it. And remember, economic relations are not just tariffs. There are investment rules. There are regulatory rules. There are all these WTO rules. Some people just don't allow it. There's agriculture in almost every country has its own special roles. But what we should be doing is trying to make sure we keep the Western world together. America has 60 military allies and partners and more than that, economic allies and partners.

5:56I think that is important. And, you know, the fragmentation of that would be the reason that a book is written one day, How the West Was Lost. Now you're in charge of Europe for a day. Where do you start? That's, you know, that's the great Kissinger quote. if you need to talk to Europe, who do you call? I think it has to start with MERS, Macron won't be there much longer, Starmer, Maloney, and actually they're talking about the cluition of the willing. You're not going to get all 28 nations, but if you get the six big ones to agree to do some of those things, I think the other ones will have to do it.

6:32And it'll be good for their citizens. I'm not trying to impose on them something that's bad. You'll have more growth, more wealth to share. It should be shared. We should help all of our citizens. Usually, anti-capital act like that's just good for business. No, it's not just good for business. It's good for creation of everything that feeds the people and houses the people. And in America, I suggest some ways to get more income to lower paid. A lot of ways, considerable ways. I think it would go a long way to fixing some of the polarization. There has been a divide. There's no question about it.

7:02I think something needs to be fixed. I also mentioned that when business goes to capitals, they should also ask the question, what can you do for your country? Like John F. Kennedy asked, not what can your country do for you? Because a lot of people that go to Washington and it's just about their tax break for sugar or cotton or corn, and that doesn't work anymore. You know, in business, you know, Norway, you have very sophisticated businesses, but, you know, businesses back away from the government because governing is really hard. And it's almost like, don't go there. But I don't think if we become part, if we're not part of the solution, it won't work.

7:34What will AI do to JP Morgan and the way you work? No, we are not going to put our heads in the sand. We're going to use AI to do a better job for you. That's what we're going to do. We've been doing it for 13 years. We've got thousands of people deployed in it. We have six or seven use cases around risk, fraud, marketing, hedging, design, location, prospecting, note-taking, AML, BSA, KYC, and it's just started. And it is really powerful stuff. And so deploy it. my suggestion would be when your management team meets they should always talk about it. It should be part of every business group you do.

8:11What are your projects? How are you doing it? What's your competition doing? It is also used by bad guys. So part of that conversation is how we protect ourselves from the bad guys. And we spend a lot of money in cyber defense. That's network segmentation, passcodes. Everything you download at JP Morgan goes through multiple protection to make sure it's not polluted. Some of it's just hygiene. You know, you put these rules in place, follow them. Don't allow me to be in our payment systems. I don't need to do it. I don't use it. And people sometimes give access to the CEO. Well, you should have access.

8:46No, because if someone got my passcode, they're in the payment systems. So you got to be quite careful how you do it. You got to work with governments. We're going to need government help. We're going to have to work together with the government to get this right. It is not possible to do it just on our own because, you know, the weak spot, the weak link is the weak link. So that could be the Norway exchange. It could be the Fedwire, it could be a JPO, it could be a vendor that serves a company that the vendor, a smaller business is taken down, the company's got to close its manufacturing plants.

9:15It could be a loaners who were just very brilliant, can use some of these things now, and think of the Unabomber in the United States, who hate banks, they hate oil companies, they hate airlines or whatever, and they're gonna cause harm. So you gotta get involved in the protection side. And then in our own company, and I think government should be thinking this way too, redeployment. So how do we, you know, if people are going to lose jobs, we want to say to them, hey, we love you. We got this job here. Here's training. You can move, you know, income assistance or early retirement so that you're taking care of your people during this process.

9:49Because I don't know this is going to happen, but unlike internet, electricity, steam engine, agricultural equipment, this may happen much faster than the ability of our society to adjust in terms of skilled jobs where people have a job, but it's not stacking a shelf, it's equal pay. And so we just need to get ready. And I think governments can be helping that too, not by doing the training programs, but by telling local schools to do the training programs, by giving tax breaks if you relocate someone or assist them or something. So they're teaching companies how to handle this. So we don't want to have so many jobs lost that you're having creating huge social problems.

10:28Talking about jobs, you've been president of the bank for a long time. What about being a president of a country? I think it's too late for me for that. You've got to run, you know. So I always say, if you anointed me, I'd be happy to do it. But there's no way I'd be able to get through primaries. Plus, I love what I do. Remember, I love what I do. I do a lot to try to help my company and my country and the world from here. I'd have to give that up for a quixotic thing.

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