In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen - HIGHLIGHTS: Jamie Dimon - CEO of JPMorgan Chase

Episode Date: May 1, 2026

We've curated a special 10-minute version of the podcast for those in a hurry.   Here you can listen to the full episode: https://podcasts.apple.com/no/podcast/live-podcast-with-jamie-dimon-ceo-jpmorgan-chase/id1614211565?i=1000764228585&l=nbIn this special live episode, Nicolai Tangen sits down with Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, at NBIM’s Investment Conference in Oslo.With 20 years at the helm of one of the world’s leading financial institutions, Dimon shares first-hand insights into what it takes to build a winning corporate culture. The conversation spans everything from global markets to the biggest challenges ahead, including geopolitics and private credit to cybersecurity and AI.This is an unique opportunity to hear one of the most influential voices in global finance reflect on leadership, resilience, and the forces shaping the global economy.In Good Company is hosted by Nicolai Tangen, CEO of Norges Bank Investment Management. New full episodes every Wednesday, and don't miss our Highlight episodes every Friday.  The production team for this episode includes Isabelle Karlsson and PLAN-B's Niklas Figenschau Johansen, Sebastian Langvik-Hansen and Pål Huuse. Background research was conducted by Karoline Woie. Watch the episode on YouTube: Norges Bank Investment Management - YouTubeWant to learn more about the fund? The fund | Norges Bank Investment Management (nbim.no)Follow Nicolai Tangen on LinkedIn: Nicolai Tangen | LinkedInFollow NBIM on LinkedIn: Norges Bank Investment Management: Administrator for bedriftsside | LinkedInFollow NBIM on Instagram: Explore Norges Bank Investment Management on Instagram Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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 Wealtham. Today, I'm in really good company because I'm here with the one and only Jamie Diamond. 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 JPMorgan, 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? First of all, welcome everybody. Thrill to be here. He is persistent, by the way. When he asked me about, do I come in 2025? I said, I can't. He said, what about this date in 2026? So here I am. I am thrilled to be here. It's wonderful. The cultures are, my whole life I was always question about when you talk about culture because you can say words, a lot of companies 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 you really is about doing the right thing for the customer eventually. Obviously, do they're going 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 things in Wall Street are built on their compensation schemes. They're not serve a client scheme. And so I've just been relentless. You know, when we first did the JPMorgan Bank One merger in 2004,

I had a book of How We Do Business. And Bill Harrison, who was the chairman at the time, said, you've got to send it out. And I was like, no, let's do it first. Let's 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 if you do that, you just drive a certain type of culture.

How do you stop bureaucracy from creeping into the organization? Because you're now, it's a huge organization, right? Yeah. The bureaucracy, 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 you could be a small company. to have it. You can be a big company to have it. You can have it in your branch. You can not

have the other branch. And it's always the manager, stupid. I mean, almost always. The way you fight is, with me, all the information is shared beforehand. So there's no one's secret. I remember going to companies and, you know, this wouldn't share that part of the company. If it isn't shared properly, I can't, I generally just cancel the meeting. You know, if someone comes in and says, you know, Nikolai wants X and I don't believe if that's right, I say, well, why did you wait for this media to do that, go talk to them. Everything, no matter how small, get on the road, go see clients. Clients are a gift because, you know, look, they're demanding they should be, but they

also tell you, you know, in our case, what our competitors are doing better. Why we didn't get something? You know, 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 look 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 so on 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 says you could cut across the company. You talk to HR.

Consumers got the most people. This change in their program is going to affect their branches. is talk about, come back, make a recommendation. I always ask if you're Kingforday, 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 said, no, no, no, what would you do? And honestly, if a lot of people are just almost crippling to try to answer that question. And so have the right people in the room, very often people are 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. If you don't have the right people in the room, it will not happen. What are the risks you are most concerned about just now? 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 and more powerful in terms of firing vulnerabilities.

It's been written about. You really should read it. And then geopolitics. So I'm not worried about the U.S. I don't worry about the U.S. economy. The economy is like the weather it's going to get better. People talk about all the time. Did you bring your, but it's not the most significant thing for the future of the free world,

free and democratic world, is the geopolitics. And which part of the geopolitics? 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 relationship is not to be. just tariffs. They're investment rules, their regulatory rules, there are all these WTO rules. There are some people just don't allow it. There's agriculture in almost every country has

its own special roles. 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. Now you're in charge of Europe for a day. Where do you start? 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, McCrone won't be there much longer. Starmor, Maloney. And actually, they're talking about the collusion of 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 as bad.

You'll have more growth, you know, more wealth to share. It should be shared. We should help all of our citizens. Usually, you know, 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'd go a long way to fixing some of the polarization. There has been a divide. There's no question about it. And I think something needs to be fixed. I also mention that when business goes 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 Norway, and you have very sophisticated businesses,

but, you know, businesses back away from the government because governing 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. What will AI do to J.P. Morgan and the way you work? No, we are not going to put our heads in the sand. We're going to use AI 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's just started. And it is really powerful stuff. And so deploy it. You know, my suggestion would be have so, when your management team meets, they should always talk about it.

It should be part of every business group you do. What are your projects? How you're doing it? What's your competition doing? It is also used by bad guys. So part of that conversation is how we protect ourselves from the bad guys. So, you know, we spend a lot of money in cyber defense.

That's network segmentation, pass codes. You know, everything you download, the JPMone goes from multiple, you know, protection to make sure it's not polluted. It's just hygiene. You know, you put these rules in place, follow them. 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 pass code, they're in the payment systems. So you've got to be quite careful how you do it. You've got to work with governments. We're going to need government help. We're going to 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 JPM. It could be a vendor that serves a company that the vendor, a smaller business is taken down. The company's got closed as 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 government should be thinking this way, too, redeployment.

So how do we, you know, if 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, you know, 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, agricultural equipment, this may happen much faster than the ability of our society to adjust in terms of skilled jobs where people have a job but it's not stacking a shelf, it's an equal pay. And so we just need to get ready.

And I think governments can be helpful in that too, not by doing the training programs, but by telling local schools to do the training programs by giving tax breaks if you relocate, someone or assist them or something. So they're teaching companies how to handle this. So we don't want to have so many jobs laws that you're having created huge social problems. Talking about jobs, you've been president of the bank for a long time.

What about being president of a country? I think it's too late for me for that. You've got to run, you know. So I always say, if you were anointed me, I'd be happy to do it. But there's no way I'd 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 it up for a quixotic thing.