The growing competition to banks from each other, shadow banks, fintechs and large technology companies is intensifying and clearly contributing to the diminishing role of banks and public companies in the United States and the global financial system, wrote J.P. Morgan chair and CEO Jamie Dimon in a letter to shareholders.
“It seems unlikely to me that all the banks, shadow banks and fintech companies will thrive as they strive to take share from each other over the next decade. I would expect to see many mergers among America’s 4,000+ banks — they need to do this, in some cases, to create more economies of scale to be able to compete. Other companies will try different strategies, including bank-fintech mergers or mergers just between fintechs. You should expect to see some winners and lots of casualties — it’s just not possible for everyone to perform well.”
“As they adopt new technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and digital platforms, banks may have an advantage in being able to leverage their large customer base to offer increasingly comprehensive products and services, often at no additional cost. While many fintech companies specialize in one area, you already see many fintechs moving in this direction — trying to deepen and broaden their client relationships.”
Dimon detailed certain achievements in response to those trends:
- In certain product areas, we made large, multi-year investments to improve a specific business. In Payments, we have been investing consistently over the past five years to modernize our businesses and compete with both banks and fintech companies. Since 2016, we have invested more than $1.5 billion in technology, operations, sales, products and controls and generated an incremental $4 billion in organic revenue annually, taking our overall market share in Treasury Services from 4.5% in 2016 to 7.2% in 2021. In 2021, we continued this strong momentum, initiating a large majority of all real-time payments in the United States in our cloud-native, faster payments platform, which is now live in 45 countries. We are also winning more than 80% of all global bids that include virtual account solutions available on our liquidity platform.
- We now process payments for eight of the top 10 global bigtech companies (up from three out of 10 companies five years ago), consistently winning business from strong competitors. We continue to bring to the market and commercialize innovative products, such as embedded banking; AI-driven fraud controls and forecasting; and account validation and programmable payments on JPM Coin. Decentralized finance and blockchain are real, new technologies that can be deployed in both public and private fashion, permissioned or not. J.P. Morgan is at the forefront of this innovation. We use a blockchain network called Liink to enable banks to share complex information, and we also use a blockchain to move tokenized US dollar deposits with JPM Coin. We believe there are many uses where a blockchain can replace or improve contracts, data ownership and other enhancements; for some purposes, however, it is currently too expensive or too slow to be deployed.