Biggest US bank is growing the old-fashioned way: Branches

Banking has gone digital, but JPMorgan is building bricks-and-mortar branches

- David Benoit, Coulter Jones and Rachel Louise Ensign

JPMorgan Chase is giving the humble bank branch some swagger.

Hundreds of branches at rival banks are being closed each year, and customers are shunning the teller and choosing the mobile app. But at the nation's biggest bank, old-fashioned bricks-and-mortar locations are part of the secret sauce.

The bank Tuesday is expected to announce plans to double down, continuing a yearslong strategy. JPMorgan plans to build 500 new branches in the next three years, filling out cities it has recently entered such as Boston, Philadelphia and Charlotte, N.C. For context: Only 17 banks have more than 500 branches today. JPMorgan has close to 5,000.

"It is a love affair with branches, just to be totally clear," Jennifer Piepszak, a top JPMorgan executive, told analysts last year.

It was 2018 when JPMorgan first announced that it would open hundreds of branches-a plan that was met with skepticism by analysts. After all, branches seemed passé even then.

But JPMorgan wasn't kidding. In the six years since, it has opened more than 650 new branches and entered 25 new states. It is the first bank with branches in all 48 contiguous U.S. states. Executives say the payout has exceeded expectations.

JPMorgan now has more than $2 trillion in deposits, nearly double what it had a decade ago. In 2021, it surpassed Bank of America as the biggest total deposit holder, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.data. Executives have a target of gathering 20% of the entire country's deposits, up from 12% today, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.

"Really every metric that we evaluate when we do investments, all of them are pointing in the right direction," Jennifer Roberts, chief executive of the Chase consumer bank, said in an interview. "All of them are indicating that our investment has been a positive choice, and we are doubling down."