The event was also a bit of a public debut for Marianne Lake, the company's new chief financial officer, who gave the day's first extended presentation. She was followed by Consumer and Community Banking CEO Gordon Smith and his deputies; Commercial Banking CEO Doug Petno; Asset Management CEO Mary Erdoes; and Daniel Pinto and Mike Cavanagh, the co-CEOs of the Corporate and Investment Bank.
Matt Zames and Frank Bisignano, who became co-chief operating officers last year, did not give presentations but were in the room. So was chief risk officer John Hogan, who interrupted his four-month leave of absence to attend the day's presentation. Dimon introduced Hogan, and expressed his jealousy of his subordinate's "sabbatical" by calling Hogan a rather salty name, to laughter.
JPMorgan Chase also used the day to announce a new partnership with Visa (NYSE:V), the world's largest payments network. Executives said the deal will allow JPMorgan to negotiate directly with merchants over how they process payments on Chase credit and debit cards.
"It will enable Chase to build direct relationships with merchants… and to negotiate pricing," says Eileen Serra, the CEO of JPMorgan's card services unit.
"We pay Visa an amount of money and we build our own direct relationship with the merchant," Smith said during his presentation.
The deal appears to be a bid by JPMorgan to gain more control over the processing of payments on its credit and debit cards; Dimon famously dislikes paying outside vendors to do functions that JPMorgan Chase could do in-house.
But JPMorgan executives also framed the partnership as an attempt to help improve its dealings with the retail industry, which has long protested the prices it must pay and the rules it must follow in order to accept credit and debit cards. Visa CEO Charlie Scharf, a longtime JPMorgan executive and Dimon protégé who took over the card network in November, has said that he is trying to expand the industry's "flexibility" and to improve its relationship with merchants.
