What’s behind JPMorgan’s fintech fight?

In its earnings call on Friday, JPMorgan announced that it will spend $1B per month in 2022 to move its operations to the cloud. It’s also offering up to $625 in incentives to customers who sign up for the company’s online brokerage platform, upping the ante in its competition against fintechs like Robinhood.

Why should we care?
Big banks are aggressively lobbying for more comprehensive fintech regulation in the U.S. In their eyes, startups can play by a different set of rules than those drafted for legacy financial institutions—a power imbalance that can cause an industry-wide regime change in the long run. JPMorgan’s new efforts might suggest that banking titans: (1) have little hope that the government will draft fintech laws that favor the old guard; (2) think those rules won’t come soon enough; (3) realize that big banks’ infrastructure is outdated and needs to adapt to survive; or (4) a mix of these variables. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon justified the company’s $12B cloud-based revamp as a necessary response to an existential risk: “If we don’t… we’ll be clunky and inefficient and hamstrung in the future when we’re trying to compete,” he said. Dimon named more than just fintechs as potential threats. Global competitors, nonbank entities, direct fiber lending, and PayPal also appear in Dimon’s analysis, placing JPMorgan in a four-dimensional game of chess. Dimon’s worldview suggests that we could see other competitive moves coming from JPMorgan in the months to come, such as in payments or lending. “There’s a lot of competition, and we intend to win—and sometimes, you need to spend a few bucks,” he said.