News
for The Wall Street Journal: America’s Biggest Bank Is Growing the Old-Fashioned Way: Branches
josé a. alvarado jr.
Feb 7, 2024
Hundreds of branches at rival banks are being closed each year, and customers are shunning the teller and choosing the mobile app. But at the nation’s biggest bank, old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar locations are part of the secret sauce.
The bank Tuesday announced plans to double down, continuing a yearslong strategy. JPMorgan plans to build 500 new branches in the next three years, it said, confirming an earlier report in The Wall Street Journal. The multibillion-dollar investment will fill out cities it has recently entered such as Boston, Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C. For context: Only 17 banks have more than 500 branches today. JPMorgan has close to 5,000.
“It is a love affair with branches, just to be totally clear,” Jennifer Piepszak, a top JPMorgan executive, told analysts last year.
It was 2018 when JPMorgan first said it would open hundreds of branches—a plan that was met with skepticism by analysts. After all, branches seemed passé even then.
But JPMorgan wasn’t kidding. In the six years since, it has opened more than 650 new branches and entered 25 new states. It is the first bank with branches in all 48 contiguous U.S. states. Executives say the payout has exceeded expectations.
Photographed for The Wall Street Journal, with words by David Benoit
https://www.wsj.com/finance/banking/jpmorgan-chase-bank-branches-expansion-cc7973dc?st=5pvpehsy39kwr2j
