All right. Good morning, everybody. This is absolutely Big Bank morning. So, you know, obviously now we have the biggest bank of them all, JPMorgan. And with us today we have the Co-CEO of the CIB, the Commercial & Investment Bank, Troy Rohrbaugh. Welcome.
Thank you very much for having me. I apologize in advance. I got a bit of a cold, so I'm gonna be eating lozenges as we speak.
Absolutely. And if we'll get you as much water as you need. So you're going to be following up a bunch of really bullish presentations this morning, so we're excited to hear from you. So speaking of which, the lion's share of investors sitting in this room today and listening in are positioned for a capital markets renaissance of sorts in 2026. What stage are we in with regards to cap markets activity for this upcycle?
Sure. I mean, you should rename it, not Big Bank morning, but bullish morning.
Yeah.
So I look, we feel very similar. Like, we're quite positive on the outlook for 2026. First off, 2025 was a very good year in investment banking overall, and we would expect that to continue. I mean, the pipelines continuing through the end of 2025 into 2026 look excellent. I think it can be really possibly one of the better years we've seen in a very long time in M&A, or certainly in that top decile. Capital markets, I think, are a little bit more challenging 'cause if you look back at the previous high, it was really driven by an incredible year in ECM.
Yeah.
That was also the year of the SPAC. You're not gonna have that SPAC involvement this year. But you have the possibility of a very robust IPO pipeline, the possibility of some true mega deals happening, and, you know, we'll see how that plays out. We're quite bullish overall. I don't think you'll necessarily see the peak of the previous wallet because of the capital markets activity being a little bit lower than those levels. But overall, you know, quite bullish.
Maybe just to unpack that a little bit. You know, obviously, you know, 2021 is a tougher comp for ECM. But as we think about advisory and as we think about some of the uncertainty around the world, you know, is that pipeline pretty solidified at this point? And to ask another way, would it take quite an exogenous event to disrupt that advisory pipeline?
Well, I feel like we live in a world where those events are more common than they used to be.
Yeah.
and we in banks are very good at getting the prediction for the wallet wrong.
Yeah.
And if you think about just last year, we were very bullish to the start of the year. We would have probably sounded just like we do this morning here a year ago, and then April 2nd happened. And I even look at ourselves. I mean, we were predicting at Investor Day for the end of the quarter, in the middle of the quarter, and we've got both banking and markets wrong. And we were only six weeks away. So if you think about it, I think things can happen that really could affect that pipeline. But assuming you don't have that type of event and we don't see any of those on the horizon, I mean, you see possibilities, geopolitics, other things. But assuming none of that happens, I feel the pipeline's quite stable.
You know, there's lots of tailwinds to that pipeline outside just, you know, individual company stories. So I think it really bodes well for this year.
Other than AI, what are the key sector themes that will drive activity levels in 2026? Maybe if you could connect that to your recently announced Security and Resiliency Initiative.
Sure. Well, first, we're super excited about SRI, and I'll get to that. But.
Yeah.
Really, it's the same three themes that you saw in 2025 and broadly drive banking wallets overall. It's technology writ large, not including just AI.
There's healthcare, I think including biotech this year. And then there's diversified industries. Like, if you don't get those three right, you're not generally gonna have a good year in investment banking. And they're really the large drivers of wallet historically. I mean, obviously, there are idiosyncratic, other events, and there are other parts of the business that will drive it on a given year. But they're the real three backbones of any banking business, we think for at least this year and has been for the last couple. I think that we're really excited specifically for us in healthcare. We've already had a very good franchise. We've added some very good, high-quality senior bankers. So we're pretty excited about, A, the wallet growing, and, B, our positioning there.
In technology, we're coming off a very strong year, both overall for the industry and for us specifically, and we'd hope to continue that momentum. Obviously, there's a lot going on in AI, and I'm sure we'll talk about that a little bit. But we think there's more going on in the whole technology sector writ large. And then diversified industries, I mean, again, we have a very strong practice, but we feel like our SRI Initiative really, really fits well with that. We identified originally 27 subareas. We now are at 28.
We are attacking all of them. The way our strategy is working with SRI is, generally speaking, when you look at those 27, 28 subsectors, we generally, over the last 10 years, put out about $100 million of financing per year, so just below $1 trillion over that 10-year period. We think it's very easy to increase that by at least 50% in the next 10 years to $1.5 trillion. I actually think it'll be bigger than that. When you think about the tailwinds of reshoring, the investments from a strategic nature that we here in the United States, North America, and our allies need to make, I think there's a lot of reasons that that number could be bigger.
And then what gets a lot of the press but is, you know, a smaller piece of it but very important is our own $10 billion of capital that we're willing to invest. Like many things we do at JPMorgan, we give a number. We start there. It's reasonable. It could be bigger. There's no reason it can't be 15 or 20. And we definitely plan to do it with partners. And, you know, it's not specifically for the U.S., so it'll benefit our franchise on a global basis. And we're already seeing the benefit of it. I mean, we're seeing lots of incoming interest both from a financing, from a banking, from an investment perspective. And we think while we're not doing it simply to improve our banking business, we're doing it for very, altruistic reasons that it's the right thing for the country.
It's the right thing for the West. We are highly likely to see the benefit of that in our banking franchise, and we're quite excited about that.
Well, that is very differentiated, actually. So thank you for diving deeply into that. There was also a recent journal article on another newly formed group at JPMorgan, the Private Capital and Advisory Solutions Group. I think you alluded to some of that. What does this tell us about sponsor monetization, which was a huge theme in the keynote this morning, that investors are hoping for in terms of IB revenue drivers in 2026?
Sure. I mean, I think it's an acknowledgment both about the private ecosystem and sponsors' role in it. So privates, both in equity and in debt, have grown substantially, as everyone in this room knows. Sponsors are a significant player and therefore have grown in importance to our franchise, both in banking and overall for the CIB. And getting that ecosystem right is absolutely critical. I think we've said that. Everyone says that. Like, you know, we feel well-positioned. We've always had a strong sponsor practice. But we feel we need to be able to provide, like, holistic solutions across equity, both public and private, and debt, both public and private.
Yeah.
The initiative you named and we like initiatives at JPMorgan, and we like naming them relatively complicated things. But broadly, that's an effort particularly focused on equities, but it can be broader than that, to advise and help companies raise equity or raise capital in private markets. And if you think about equity raises, while the IPO market, we're all expecting it to be quite strong this year, some of the largest raises you see going on in the market are in the private space. And it's.
Yeah.
In order to succeed with sponsors and with your banking business, you have to be there. And that's an effort to target that directly.
Just as a follow-up there, where do you think we are on the valuation versus timing debate with sponsors?
That's a tough one. You could probably ask some of the sponsors floating around outside this room. Look, I think there's clearly a desire to create liquidity for your investors. And there's clearly been an extension of the private equity investment timeframe. So I think there's a really big hope and desire to create that liquidity this year. And I think that's one of the tailwinds to, the banking wallet. So we're pretty excited about the ability to monetize these investments at a, what I would say, increasing pace.
Switching topics a little bit, you have clearly done well in growing indirect lending. Of course, you've previously talked about you just mentioned your direct lending efforts. You've explained in the past that this initiative is not a way to grow assets but a way to stay in the middle of the ecosystem. What kind of opportunity has this initiative presented to JPMorgan, and how are you guys uniquely positioned to address this opportunity?
Sure. So, you know, we have announced and we do a series of things in the private credit ecosystem. I don't wanna say we're the first bank to do financing of pools of private credit, but we were one of the first banks, and we have one of the largest financing businesses. We have always lent money. I mean, we've been around for over 200 years, and lending money to clients is not new to us. Direct lending is just lending in a new type of format.
Yeah.
Or an old type of format, however you wanna think about it. So, you know, we believe our goal is not you know, our goal is not, as we said at Investor Day, to just grow assets on the balance sheet. Now, that's a byproduct. So if you think about what we've done, we have a little bit over 12, roughly $14 billion on our own balance sheet of direct lending. We've announced that we'll do up to $50 billion. We've always said we do that in a risk-adjusted manner, so there's no rush to get to that number. It's just putting a number out there that shows the capacity and the size and scale. We have roughly $25 billion of partner capital that we can use alongside us in various sleeves. So we are very significant.
I think what we've seen on the back of that announcement in the creation of these pools of capital is we're not there just to create these assets on our balance sheet or to compete with our clients 'cause our sponsor clients are, and our alternative clients, very important to us. We're there to partner in that ecosystem for both buyers and lenders. It's kept us in the conversation, meaning there's no deal that a client can't come to us, regardless of the size, where we can't participate. Then we always look to bring in partners. Our number one goal is to be agnostic to the borrower's need, to be able to go in and provide a whole set of solutions. I used to say and people who know me well at JPMorgan know I love analogies.
Like, we used to go in and say, "Okay, you need to buy shoes. Would you like red or green?" And that's how we sold our products. Specifically. And I also think, at least there for now, the pipeline looks even stronger than it does relative to Europe, Middle East, and Asia. But that's also simply because the U.S. pipeline is so strong.
Yeah.
But we're expecting a good year across the franchise on a global basis. I mean, we have, as you said, an incredible franchise in Europe. We're seeing real momentum, a solid pipeline. So we're expecting growth from an IB pipeline basis on a global basis. When it comes to broadly, I think maybe more importantly for us in the CIB is we think we're extremely well-placed to exploit what we think is a fundamental shift in trade corridors. So if you look at it, we, along with other U.S. banks, but we particularly dominate the dollar corridors. We're the largest Payments bank in terms of dollars. We have huge franchises. We have great revenue bases and client bases going in and out of the U.S., in some of the bigger markets as well.
But if you look at absolute growth, a lot of this is Middle East to Asia, Middle East to Europe, Middle East to Latin America, Asia to Europe. They're gonna be the corridors of growth, in my mind, in the future that probably maybe not reaching the size and scale of a dollar corridor anytime soon, but they're gonna grow faster than the dollar corridors. We are trying to position ourselves to take advantage of the fact that we've been in many of these locations for a very long time. We have good base franchises to really accelerate growth. I think particularly the Middle East, Japan, South Korea, obviously, the China ecosystem continues to be very important, and then in Latin America, particularly Brazil and Mexico.
So to wrap up the discussion on banking, you know, investors have been using a mid-teens growth number as a placeholder for the banking wallet in 2026 year-over-year. Is that the right ballpark for the wallet?
I mean, I'm a trader, so I get really nervous when you start predicting wallets. I mean, it's certainly possible that we see that. I think there's real factors. Like I said, from an M&A perspective, I think you can have a top decile or possibly the best year we've seen in a decade and certainly beat the previous high. I think capital markets, it's really gonna depend on the environment, and it's gonna depend on whether some of these large mega deals get done. So it's possible we get there. I'm hopeful that that's the right number. But I think, you're gonna need a lot of things to go right to get to that level.
Got it. Let's switch topics to the markets business. I'm excited about your analogies, Troy. We're coming off another.
I'm getting nervous. I might have to tone those down.
We are coming off another stellar year for the industry. So, of course, investors are wondering, how sustainable is this? So maybe, you've talked about this in previous Investor Days. Remind everybody about how to think through the pre-pandemic and post-pandemic wallets. And additionally, a peer of yours talked about markets growth in 2026 at two times GDP growth. Does that fair to you?
Sure. I'll start this a little bit the way we think about it is, you know, we were at a fairly consistent run rate post-GFC going into the COVID year of 2020. And we were growing market share and growing revenue slowly with a wallet that was basically flat, and in some cases down slightly. So 2020 was that exceptional year where you saw, I think, almost a 30% increase in the size of the wallet.
Yeah.
In one year. All of us predicted 75% of that would normalize away in the following year. And it just didn't. So we saw a little bit of normalization, and then it really quickly went back to that 2020 year. And then you saw the last two years, like, a significant expansion, particularly 2025. So number one, as I said in the beginning, we're really good at being wrong at predicting the size of the wallet. And we got the wallet post-COVID wrong. And I think we sort of missed a few fundamental things. Base volatility is significantly higher than it was in the pre-COVID post-GFC years. The size of the corporate wallet is significantly higher, and that's created real opportunity. The banking wallet has grown, and there's a bit of a halo, certainly, from M&A and other things in capital markets into our markets business.
And the demand for financing, as alternatives and sponsors have grown, has grown dramatically. So it's created a much bigger ecosystem for the market business to participate in with higher levels of volatility and opportunity, with more corporate activity. And we just didn't predict that. And I think that makes the new level of the wallet much more sustainable and durable. Obviously, it can go up and down in any given year. Our boss likes to call markets revenue the weather. It's, like, very hard to predict, and we're gonna try and do as well as possible. Our view is we're just incredibly well-placed as a franchise to keep growing in the areas that are growing, to keep doubling down on our clients. We have the resources to commit both from an investment perspective and a financing perspective. And we're committed to doing that in a thoughtful, risk-adjusted way.
We think we can keep growing market share along the way. If you do get a big spike in volatility, historically, that's when we perform extremely well, and we would hope to see that again.
So, there's been a bunch of talk, and this has been the topic of this conference, about market structure evolution, particularly tokenization. I like that smile. It's gonna be a good answer. What is your view and JPMorgan's view on this evolution? And how does a bank balance sheet fit into this?
Sure. I mean, you're broadly talking about sort of tokenization.
Digital assets.
Digital assets. So, I mean, we break it into two parts of our business. One is how it will affect market structure in terms of our markets business. And then obviously, the effect it'll have on our Security ervices, payments.
Payments.
The rest of the JPMorgan Chase franchise. So first off, I think we're incredibly well-placed for whatever does happen. I mean, despite JPMorgan maybe having a reputation of having views on cryptocurrencies and other things, we've invested absolutely heavily in blockchain for a very long time. We have an effort called Kinexys.
Yeah.
That we believe is the leading bank effort on blockchain and in digitization of assets. We have our own Stablecoin, the JPMorgan Coin. So this is an area that we are very experienced in, that we are investing heavily in, and we're well-prepared for. So if you see market structure in securities shift to tokenization or digital assets, we're well-prepared for it. Now, I think in some cases, I'm still trying to figure out the problem they're trying to solve because.
You're right.
Realistically, market structure in many securities, like equities, works extremely well. But, you know, we're not gonna resist the trend. This isn't us standing in the way of it. It's us being completely prepared for it if it indeed does happen. I do think there are parts of our markets ecosystem that digital assets could actually benefit, and open doors for smaller investors. And I think that could be exciting. But we're just gonna have to see how it develops. But we're well-prepared for it. And we think we'll be, whatever happens, be able to participate as a leading player.
What areas are those where digitization could open up the investor base?
I mean, I think you look at things that are more complicated, like an SPG in terms of, like, large financings that historically are the purview of only investors or large investors, you could see some democratization of those types of investments if you can make them digital-friendly.
So.
But again, that's, like, in the future.
Yeah. So generally speaking, there have been market share shifts in the markets business for certain products, particularly following the global financial crisis, right? So with strong momentum and deregulation in Washington, another theme of this conference, is there an opportunity to profitably recover some of that lost market share for the industry?
Sure. You know, when it comes to pure markets, you know, you're obviously talking about non-bank market makers.
Yeah.
Or non-bank financial institutions. You know, I would make the argument that the trend towards them was happening before the GFC. And I think more so than regulation in the market-making space, it's really electronification.
Okay.
They embraced electronification. Electronification made it a lot easier for them to access markets. They started in what I would say the anonymous, like, exchange, like, CLOB, or central limit order book markets. Then they've expanded from that. I think they historically were areas where banks weren't as significant and that they honed their skills. They grew. They created revenue. They created capital to continue to invest. They've done an incredible job. Now, I might argue they've taken most of their market share from the banks in the lower part outside of the top tier. But they certainly have taken market share from everyone as they've grown. We're fully prepared to compete with them. But I'm not convinced the change in regulation is gonna have a meaningful impact on how we are able to compete with them.
It's still gonna be about investments in technology, investments in quant trading, central limit order books internally. So it's really about how you organize yourself, how you invest, the skill sets you have, and your willingness to compete in that space a little bit more than regulatory change. 'Cause I think the regulatory change will have a little bit more of an impact on the financial resources or liquidity that we have to deploy, which will not affect our market-making businesses in a meaningful way.
So speaking of financial resources, you know, Basel III finalization, potential G-SIBs or charge recalibration, which, you know, management has been calling for forever, would particularly impact JPMorgan. You know, does that impact how capital's allocated to your businesses and how you think about it? I mean, you mentioned that that's not necessarily going to impact how you compete, but, you know.
So look, we're very blessed at JPMorgan to have, like.
A ton of capital already.
Lots of capital and have all the financial resources we need to grow the business. So obviously, at any given moment, there's a whole bunch of variables that affect the capital that we have as a company and the capital we have as a business and then how we allocate that capital within our business. Doug and I like to think that we spend a lot of time on this. We work very closely with Jeremy and Charles Bristow in the center. Brett, who's sitting out there as our CFO, we dynamically allocate capital not only as a company but as a CIB business. And we're not afraid to move it around based upon what has the most client impact and has the best risk-adjusted return. And client impact is arguably number one. And obviously, we wanna do that with a high risk-adjusted return.
But we're in the business of serving clients with these resources first. So again, we're not really bound in a significant way. There are points. But I don't feel like we've been unable to grow our business anywhere as a result of these constraints. It's really that these capital changes would potentially give us more capital above and beyond what we have now or resources, liquidity, etc., that we could invest and lean into the franchise. I think that will be a benefit to, A, the whole company, but, B, specifically the CIB. Because when you think about deploying capital, usually, the easiest, fastest way to deploy it is in your markets businesses.
Yeah.
or in your lending businesses.
Yeah.
So clearly, the change in capital rules will be beneficial. And one of the first places we probably will deploy excess capital, assuming we believe we can find a risk-adjusted return or we're comfortable with the risk we're taking, would be in markets and in our banking franchise. It takes longer to deploy it in payments and security services and other parts of the company 'cause they're longer-term investments. But there'll be places we do it across the whole JPMorgan Chase entity. Now, you know, I think, though, we'll be deploying that in a world where a lot of people have excess resources. So we wanna be really careful about the returns and make sure they're accretive to our franchise and our clients.
Maybe just switching topics. In the fourth-quarter earnings presentation, your IR team laid out the drivers of 2026, expenses in a very clear and color-coded manner. And I noticed how much CIB was allocated in terms of year-over-year expense growth under the category bankers, advisors, and branches.
Sure.
Could you unpack that a little bit and give us a little bit more color on what kind of talent you're hiring and where?
Sure. I mean, we've made publicly stated a significant investment in our global banking franchise. Just as a reminder to people, that's the Commercial Bank.
Yeah.
That's the Global Corporate Bank and GIB or the Global Investment Bank . So we've hired roughly 1,000 people last year in the front office. About a third of those are senior bankers, with the majority of them either being in the CB or the GIB. So if you think about the CB strategy, Doug and his team have done an incredible job over the last decade or more. They've invested systematically as we've grown the franchise across the U.S., new locations, going deeper in existing locations, really expanded both the quality and the size of the CB offering. And we're continuing to do that. We're probably in the latter innings of that because we've just done so much of it. But there's still real opportunity there, particularly in, like, the innovation economy clients. But that's a place where we're always gonna be investing.
The scale and speed may slow down as we get to maturity, but there's still room to go there. The GCB, we're growing on a global basis. We think there's a lot of opportunity there for bankers to partner with our offering and payments. And we think there's a lot of growth opportunity. There's also Mid-Cap Banking , which has been very successful in the U.S., that we think we can deploy on a global basis and really expand the footprint of clients we have. And when you think about deploying capital resources, that could be a space where.
Yeah.
With the right places, the right geographies, the right companies, we could really look to lean in. And then there's the classic GIB. You know, with our SRI initiative, like, we're adding bankers there.
Yeah.
We have identified every subsector where we're not number one or where we have the possibility to grow more market share. We feel that there's really a lot of white space there for us to keep growing. It's an incredibly competitive environment. Hiring high-quality people is a challenge. We're focused on it. We're not gonna, in the GIB space or really anywhere in global banking, focus on quantity over quality. We feel like, with the right effort, we can get a little bit of both.
Of course, I have to ask an AI question specific to your business. So in terms of the CIB impact specifically, I think previously you've talked about cost efficiency opportunities, KYC, for example. And I think the number that you may have thrown out there is the unit cost coming down here 40% from AI. Maybe talk a little bit more about the back-office opportunities. But are there revenue opportunities in your business that could emerge from this technology?
Sure. There's both. You know, I think when I think about the opportunities for AI for us in the CIB, there's clearly where we've been using it very aggressively for a long time. And it continues to evolve from machine learning to AI is fraud detection, or fraud prevention. And that continues to be a huge piece of where we deploy AI, both from, protecting our clients' bases but also, like, you know, we feel like by having a very safe offering, it attracts people to us. So we don't really call that a revenue opportunity, but we think it has some revenue impact. There's the cost savings. You mentioned KYC, AML. That's, you know, as you said, roughly a 40% reduction. But if you look across all of our ops, we started with automation. We're now deploying AI in a more significant way across our operations franchise.
And if you look at the amount of volumes we now process across markets, across payments, across security services, and the leverage we're getting with the fact that we're just not increasing our costs anywhere near that volume or complexity growth, that's all a result of automation and early-stage AI. And we think there's a lot of possibility for that to continue. And that's cost mitigation. On the revenue side, we're in early days. I mean, we have roughly 400 AI projects across the CIB. We're seeing some show significant possibility. And what we do is we deploy a project. We see if it works. If it's working and it's scalable, we try to not only scale it where it's being deployed but does it have applications in other parts of the franchise?
So just to give you some high-level examples, we're seeing real revenue growth with our AI projects in our Prime Finance business. We're seeing it in our FX business. We're seeing it with our bankers in terms of helping them be more efficient, knowing the clients to call, knowing the deals to pursue. And again, this is all really early stage. I think there's lots of possibility here. And we're, again, uniquely positioned. We have a huge amount of data. We have a huge franchise. We have a lot of front-office people out there that if you just make them 10% more efficient, the revenue growth is substantial. So I'm particularly excited about it. I mean, we are gonna attack the cost side, but I'm really excited about what we potentially can do on the revenue side 'cause that's the game-changing part of AI for our franchise.
How much of this can you keep versus it getting computed away?
I mean, first of all, no one can answer that question like, "Well, we're gonna keep 47% of the giveaways.
You know, of course, of course. But this is the existential question, right?
It's, you have to be realistic. This is just a personal view. I think where you think you're gonna explicitly charge for it, you're gonna get competed away. Like, if you're gonna say, "We're gonna provide you with this extra service because of our capability in AI, and we want you to pay for it on top of what you already pay us as a client," that's gonna be difficult.
Yeah.
When you think about, like, us being more efficient in our ability to trade foreign exchange.
Yeah.
Or deliver service to prime, it's gonna allow us to grow our franchise, increase our profitability. And that we should be able to retain a reasonable part of. But as other people deploy it, I think it's one of these things where the benefits will be shared between us and the customer. Exactly how much either way, it's really hard to tell and will arguably depend on the product.
And I'm sure we'll hear a little bit more from the company during the update later this month. But maybe just talk a little bit 'cause you've touched on it about some of the near-term momentum and opportunities in both payments and security services.
Sure. I mean, we're excited for our company update, 2 weeks, I think. I would say, and I don't say this lightly. I'll start with security services. I think Doug and I call this, like, our secret gem. He and I are, like, super proud of this business. And it doesn't get anywhere near enough coverage, I would argue.
Yeah.
Now, I'm not gonna name any of the people in it, but you can look them up because I don't want you calling them up and people saying, like, "How do we, you know, get such an incredible management team?" But really, the team is fantastic. They've built a state-of-the-art system. They've grown not only the assets under custody and the NII associated with that, but they've really grown the feedline in other services, both data services, alternatives, fund servicing. They've really created a ton of momentum. So while they've grown in market share, they've really done it more profitably than anyone else in the street. So I think there's a lot of momentum there. That business can keep growing. And we're really excited about it. We feel very well-placed there.
In payments, again, I think this is the space that we probably have the most to gain from an upside to the bottom line or, like, top line and bottom line because it's so accretive to shareholder value. So we're growing our banking coverage. We're growing the number of clients we cover. We're improving our product suite in payments. We're investing heavily in, you know, digital offerings to clients across the whole spectrum. And we have the capability, really, to grow our FX on an international basis between markets and payments and global banking. And that's, again, something that we've historically been behind some of our peers that there's real opportunity in. And we've seen market share growth there, but we're really just scratching the surface.
Finally, Troy, could you give us an update on how banking and markets trends are faring so far this quarter?
Mikael told me not to answer this question. So, no. I mean, we'll give real guidance at the company update. The way I would say is it started well across the franchise.
Okay. Great. Well, we'll wrap up there as another exclamation point or a bullish morning. Thank you, Troy, for speaking.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.