Jamie Dimon, CEO of JP Morgan Chase
David A. Grogan | CNBC
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon observed a new generation of fintech players, led by PayPal, Square and tech giants around the world, have grown exponentially in users and market value.
Your message to the management team of your $ 3.4 trillion banking goliath: Be afraid.
“For sure, we should be scared – less about it,” said Dimon on Friday in a conference call with analysts. “We have a lot of resources, a lot of very smart people. We just need to be faster, better, faster. … Seeing what we did, you would say we did a good job, but other people did a good job too.”
Dimon’s blunt assessment was in response to questions from analysts, including Mike Mayo of Wells Fargo, who pointed out that with rich, technology-like assessments, fintech players have “defeated” traditional banks in recent years.
Dimon said he sent his representatives a list of global competitors, and that PayPal, Square, Stripe, Ant Financial, as well as U.S. tech giants, including Amazon, Apple and Google, are names the bank needs to keep an eye on. The rivals are also customers of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank in many cases, he added.
The competition will be particularly fierce in the payment world, he said: “I hope to see a very, very difficult and brutal competition in the next 10 years,” said Dimon. “I hope to win, so help me God.”
Dimon added that, in some cases, the new players were “examples of unfair competition” against which the bank would eventually do something. It included players who take advantage of the richest debit card revenue for small banks and businesses that Dimon accused of not taking precautions against money laundering.
He specifically called Plaid, the payments start-up whose acquisition by Visa recently failed, saying “people who misuse the data they have been given, such as Plaid”.
Plaid CEO Zach Perret declined to respond directly to the accusation during an interview with CNBC’s David Faber, adding that Plaid is spending time with the bank in a partnership.
– CNBC’s Dawn Giel contributed the report.