Loading summary
Transcript16 lines
- [00:01]
A
Hi everybody. Tune in to this short version of the podcast, which we do every Friday. For the long version, tune in on Wednesdays. Hi everyone. I'm Nicola Tangen, the CEO of the Norwegian so On wealth fund. Today I'm in really good company because I'm here with the one and only Jamie Dimon. He runs the largest bank in the world. 20 years at the helm and his annual shareholder letters are mandatory reading for everybody in the financial sector. We recorded this live on stage at our investment conference in Oslo. We are proud investors in JP Morgan. Jamie, welcome to In Good Company. The first question has to be what is the culture that has made you able to be so successful now after 200 years?
- [00:54]
B
First of all, welcome everybody. Thrilled to be here. He is persistent, by the way. When he asked me about come in 2025, I said I can't. He said, what about this date in 2026? So here I am. But I am thrilled to be here. It's wonderful. Cultures are my whole life. I was always cautious about. We talk about culture because you could say words. A lot of clients say, employees, customers, and they don't mean it. So the real way you develop a culture, you're just driving it with grit and courage. Like every meeting, everything you do, every trip you make, every person you hire, every person you fire, that it really is about doing the right thing for the customer. Eventually obviously do they got to take care of your employee. A lot of cultures on Wall street, as you know, it was about money. How much money can someone make? And you know, some of the, some of the things in Wall street are built on their compensation schemes. They're not serve a client scheme. And so I've just been relentless. When we first did the J.P. morgan Bank One merger in 2004, I had a book, how we do Business and Bill Harrison, who was the chairman at the time, said you got to send it out. I was like, no, let's do it first. Let's let people experience the detail, the diligence, the fortress balance sheet, all these things, the follow up, the open meetings that you have to speak up. It's not even a choice, hopefully so. And if you do that, you just drive a certain type of culture.
- [02:18]
A
How do you stop bureaucracy from creeping into the organization? Because you are now it's a huge organization, right? Yeah.
- [02:26]
B
I really believe this bureaucracy, complacency and arrogance will take down a company. Bureaucracy is like the petri dish of politics and everything else. And there are and by you could be a small company and have it, you could Be a big company and have it. You can have it in your branch, you cannot have the other branch. As always, the manager, stupid. I mean, almost always the way you fight it is with me, all the information is shared beforehand. So there's no secret. I remember going to companies and this wouldn't share that part of the company if it isn't shared properly. I generally just cancel the meeting. If someone comes in and says, nikolai wants X and I don't believe that's right, I say, well, why did you wait for this meeting to do that? Go talk to him. Everything, no matter how small. Get on the road, go see clients. Clients are a gift because, look, they're demanding, they should be. But they also tell you in our case what our competitors are doing better, why we didn't get something. If we don't do this in that country, you're not going to give us a big piece of business because how important it is for you, and I uniquely know it might cost $30 million to build a payment system to hook up to a country, but it's easy to say, well, we're going to do it now. I just found out why the staff isn't doing it. So when you have a meeting, people often don't know who's running it. That's a mistake. When you have a meeting and someone ends the meeting by saying, that was a great meeting, we'll pick it up again next week, it's usually a bad meeting. The meeting should end with, okay, David, you're going to do X, Talk to these people. Not hierarchical, it's just you could cut across the company. You talk to hr, you know, consumers got the most people, this change in their program is going to affect their branches. Talk about, come back, make a recommendation. I always ask, if you're king for today, what are you going to do? Because people walk in and they admire a problem. If you ask them what they're going to do, they say, well, I look at this, I say, no, no, what would you do? And honestly, for a lot of people, it's just almost crippling to try to answer that question and so have the right people in the room. Very often people making decisions, like people think you go back to your office and you think, no, usually you iterate over and over and over and it gets you to the right place.
- [04:36]
A
Why should these people.
- [04:37]
B
If you don't have the right people in the room, it will not happen.
- [04:41]
A
What are the risks you are most concerned about just now?
- [04:43]
B
Oh, cyber. There's two cyber because of Mythos which I assume a lot of you guys have read about. But the bad guys can use cyber and they're going to get stronger, more powerful trying to defying vulnerabilities. It's been written about. You really should read it. And then, and then geopolitics. So I'm not, I'm not worried about the U.S. i don't worry about the U.S. economy. You know the economy is like the weather. It's going to get better. It's going to get. People talk about all the time. Did you bring your. But it's not the most, the most significant thing for the future, the free world, free and democratic world is the geopolitics.
- [05:17]
A
And which part of the geopolitics?
- [05:19]
B
I'd say the wars in Ukraine, Iran, our relationship that NATO has to stay strong, that we need to work with our trading partners to keep the western world together. I think the worst thing we can do is fragment it. And remember economic relations is not just tariffs. There are investment rules, there are regulatory rules. There are, there are all these WTO rules there, there are. Some people just don't allow it. There's agriculture and almost every country has its own special rules. But what we should be doing is trying to make sure we keep the western world together. America has 60 military allies and partners and more than that economic allies and partners. I think that is important and you know the fragmentation of that would be the reason that a book is written one day. How the west was Lost.
- [06:06]
A
Now you're in charge of Europe for a day. Where do you start?
- [06:10]
B
That's, you know, that's the great Kissinger quote. If you need to talk to Europe, who do you call? I think it has to start with Mers and McCrone won't be there much longer. Starmer, Maloney and actually they're talking about the cluish and the willing. You're not going to get all 28 nations but if you get the six big ones to agree to do some of those things, I think the other ones will have to do it and it'll be good for their citizens. I'm not trying to impose on them something that's bad. You'll have more growth, more wealth to share. It should be shared. We should help all of our citizens. Usually anti capital act like that's just good for business. No, it's not just good for business. It's good for creation of everything that feeds the people and houses the people. And in America I suggest some ways to get more income to lower paid a lot of ways, considerable Ways. I think it would go a long way to fixing some of the polarization. There has been a divide. There's no question about it. I think something needs to be fixed. I also mentioned that when business goes to, to capitals, they should also ask the question, what can you do for your country? Like John F. Kennedy asked, not what can your country do for you? Because a lot of people that go to Washington and it's just about their tax break for sugar or cotton or corn or. And that doesn't work anymore. You know, in business, you know, Norway and you have very sophisticated businesses, but, you know, businesses back away from the government because government is really hard and it's almost like, don't go there. But I don't think if we become part, if we're not part of the solution, it won't work.
- [07:35]
A
What will AI do to JP Morgan and the way you work?
- [07:39]
B
No, we are not going to put our heads in the sand. We're going to use AI to do a better job for you. That's what we're going to do. We've been doing it for 13 years. We've got thousands of people deployed in it. We have six or seven use cases around risk fraud, marketing, hedging, design, location prospecting, note taking, aml, bsa, kyc. And it's just started and it is really powerful stuff. And so deploy it. My suggestion would be have some. When your management team meets, they should always talk about it. It should be part of every business review you do. What are your projects? How are you doing it? What's your competition doing? It is also used by bad guys. So part of that conversation is, how do we protect ourselves from the bad guys? And we spend a lot of money in cyber defense. That's network segmentation passcodes. You know, everything you downloaded to JPMorgan goes through multiple, you know, protection to make sure it's not polluted. It's almost just hygiene. You know, you put these rules in place, follow them, don't allow, don't allow me to be in our payment systems. I don't need to do it, I don't use it. And people sometimes give access to the CEO. Well, you should have access. No, if someone got my passcode, they're in the payment systems. So you got to be quite careful how you do it. You got to work with governments. We need, we're going to need government help. Have to work together with the government to get this right. It is not possible to do it just on our own because, you know, the weak spot, the weak link is the weak link. That could be the Norway exchange, it could be the Fed wire, it could be a jp it could be a vendor that serves a company that the vendor, a smaller business has taken down. The company's got to close its manufacturing plants. It could be a loaners who were just very brilliant can use some of these things now. And think of the Unabomber in the United States who hate banks, they hate oil companies, they hate airlines or whatever and they're going to cause harm. So you got to get involved in the protection side and then in our own company. And I think governments should be thinking this way too. Redeployment. So how do we, you know, if we people are going to lose jobs, we want to say to them, hey, we love you. We got this job here. Here's training. You can move income assistance or early retirement so that you're taking care of your people during this process. Because I don't know this is going to happen. But unlike Internet, electricity, steam engine, agriculture equipment, this may happen much faster than the ability of our society to adjust in terms of skilled jobs. Where people have a job, it's not stacking a shelf, it's equal pay. And so we just need to get ready. And I think governments be helped from that too. Not by doing the training programs but, but by telling local schools to do the training programs, by you know, giving tax breaks if you relocate someone or assist them or something. So they're teaching companies how to handle this. So we need, you know, we don't want to have so many jobs loss that you're having, creating huge social problems.
- [10:29]
A
Talking about jobs, you've been president of the bank for a long time. What about being president of a country?
- [10:35]
B
I think it's too late for me for that. You got to run, you know. And so I always say, if you anointed me, I'd be happy to do it, but there's no way I'd be able to get through primaries. Plus, I love what I do, remember, I love what I do. I do a lot to try to help my company and my country and the world from here. I'd have to give that up for a quixotic thing.