Why JPMorgan Chase is looking to grow in Jacksonville (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — JPMorgan Chase is looking to grow its presence in Jacksonville, with the potential of adding more employees and business lines in the area.
During a visit to the First Coast on Wednesday, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon compared Jacksonville to the operation the bank has in Plano, Texas.
“It was a tech center, and now there are three buildings and 4,000 people,” he said about the Texas operation. “That could easily happen here.”
The CEO of the country’s largest bank stopped by Jacksonville on a tour of the bank’s facilities in the region, spending time in Charleston, South Carolina, on Tuesday and heading to Miami after Jacksonville.
His visit came as the bank announced that it was planning a major expansion in Northeast Florida, opening 10 more branches in the area as well as a private banking client center.
“Jacksonville was actually the first new market we ever put a branch in, because I wanted to test ‘can you go to a new market and build a profitable thing’,” he said. “And that branch is now 20; that 20 is going to 30.”
Two of the new branches will be in low-to-moderate-income neighborhoods in Jacksonville and St. Augustine, part of the bank’s efforts to expand its customer base and deal with issues of housing inequality.
That includes having community managers — employees tasked with connecting the bank to the local area — in some branches, including Chase’s downtown Jacksonville location.
“A lot of Americans will say, I don’t think JPMorgan Chase wants me,” Dimon said. “But we do. We have products and services across the full spectrum.”
Leaning into building personal connection is important, said Mark O’Donovan, CEO of Chase Home Lending, who was also visiting the First Coast this week.
Home lending is the bank’s largest activity on the First Coast, with more than 1,300 employees in the area in that division. Overall, the bank has about 1,700 employees, with plans to add about 100 with the new branches.
Addressing the racial disparity in homeownership rates requires the bank to “be present in our communities,” O’Donovan said.
“We need to have people on the ground in our local communities, to start to build trust in those communities,” he said. “Our goal over the past several years has been to continue to build our brand in our local communities: To be present and not be seen as episodic.”
Jacksonville is one of the cities where Chase offers a $5,000 grant for those buying homes in predominantly Black, Hispanic and Latino neighborhoods. Buyers in those neighborhoods also have access to a low-down-payment mortgage option.
As for housing in general, Dimon said the biggest challenge is a lack of supply — which is why prices continue to rise even though interest rates are high.
The housing supply will eventually catch up with demand, he said.
As for interest rates, though, he doesn’t see significant declines coming.
“I say, we just went back to normal,” he said about the Federal Reserve’s hiking of its target rate. “We had very abnormal for a long time.”
Photo courtesy of Insider Intelligence