JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has expressed his fears about the future of both traditional banks and the country at large following the growth of Big Tech into the financial industry. The companies referenced by Dimon include well-known behemoths such as Amazon, Apple, and Google in addition to more business-focused apps such as Square, Stripe, and PayPal.
According to CNBC , Dimon made the comments during a conference call with analysts on Friday morning. The CEO, who oversees a banking empire worth $3.4 trillion, confessed that he was “scared sh*tless” over the competition that fintech — a portmanteau of finance and technology — offers both at present and in the future.
“Absolutely, we should be scared,” he said. “We have plenty of resources, a lot of very smart people. We’ve just got to get quicker, better, faster…. As you look at what we’ve done, you’d say we’ve done a good job, but the other people have done a good job, too.”
Dimon specifically noted that the area in which financial tech companies will be a particular threat is payments. Mobile payment services have grown exponentially in recent years, with apps such as Venmo paving the way in what is called the peer-to-peer (P2P) payment market. Banking institutions fought back with the creation of Zelle, which is partly owned by companies such as Bank of America and JPMorgan Chase.
“I expect to see very, very tough, brutal competition in the next 10 years,” Dimon said. “I expect to win, so help me God.”
Moreover, Dimon expressed worries not just about the threat of competition, but also over the supposedly questionable practices often used in developing tech services, which he stated gave them an “unfair advantage.” For example, he specifically claimed that many startups “improperly use data that’s been given to them.”
In addition, he said that many apps do not protect against money laundering. Dimon gave an example of the latter with Plaid, a payments startup that was almost acquired by Visa but whose merger was ended after the threat of legal action from the U.S. Department of Justice. Meanwhile, Plaid has denied all allegations of improper conduct.
Dimon’s comments come as the United States and the world at large remain anxious about its economic future in light of rising unemployment levels and shutdowns necessitated by the novel coronavirus pandemic. The U.S. stock market remained sluggish this week despite President-elect Joe Biden’s pledge of a mammoth stimulus package.
As covered by The Inquisitr , one billionaire investor warned of a potential economic crisis on the horizon as he believed there was “too much debt” in the market.
