JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has spent the past year reassuring analysts and investors that the bank’s multibillion-dollar binge on technology ventures is part of a carefully designed plan that will pay off.
(Bloomberg) — JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has spent the past year reassuring analysts and investors that the bank’s multibillion-dollar binge on technology ventures is part of a carefully designed plan that will pay off.
But a lawsuit filed by the bank against the founder of one of those ventures — a complaint alleging she concocted millions of fake customers — risks renewing concerns about JPMorgan’s rapid deployment of shareholder cash in recent years.
The largest US bank accused Charlie Javice, who founded college financial-planning website Frank, and one of her former lieutenants of misleading JPMorgan into completing the $175 million takeover in 2021, a lofty moment for financial-technology startups. A lawyer for Javice, just 29 when she sold the venture to New York-based JPMorgan, disputed the allegations and accused the bank of trying “retrade the deal.”
“This raises to the fore questions about whether JPMorgan is spending too much too fast,” Mike Mayo, a veteran bank analyst at Wells Fargo & Co., said in an interview. “The purchase price is less than half of 1% of this year’s earnings, but it still stands as a potential microcosm of a broader issue that perhaps JPMorgan is wasting more money than desired as it pursues such aggressive spending.”
The dispute over the Frank acquisition “will be resolved through the legal process,” a JPMorgan representative said.
The hot topic on an analyst call last January was the bank’s heightened spending projections for 2022, a concern that sent the stock into a dive that day. The bank has scooped up seemingly far-flung ventures focused on asset- and wealth-management, payments, restaurant reviews and even timberland as it seeks to build a more-digital business for the future.
Under pressure to provide more specifics, Dimon and other senior executives later sketched out the bank’s strategy at an investor day in May, describing their expectations for investments to eventually pay off. Analysts praised the level of detail and the shares rose the most in a year and a half.
JPMorgan is scheduled to report annual results Friday. The conference call that morning may give analysts an opening to ask the firm about a pair of lawsuits between the bank and Javice that landed in Delaware federal court last month and emerged in media reports this week.
“What should be raised is why the weak due diligence,” said David Donovan, who leads the Americas financial-services practice at technology-consulting firm Publicis Sapient. “They are blaming straight fraud, which could be true, but that means their vetting teams need to be better detecting this.”
–With assistance from David Scheer.
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