RPT-BREAKINGVIEWS-Jamie Dimon overstretches his fintech flex

By Jeffrey Goldfarb

NEW YORK, July 17 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Jamie Dimon is fighting his fears. Four years ago, JPMorgan’s JPM.N boss warned that mega-banks like the one he runs should be “scared shitless” about technologically savvy financial challengers. Now he has begun pushing back in ways that are spooking those same fast-growing rivals. Such aggressive tactics, which include recently initiated plans to charge data aggregators for access to basic customer data, attest to his anxiety and betray a heightened risk tolerance for coping with it.

The biggest concern is that new fintech ventures start with clean software slates, giving them an edge over incumbents saddled with patchwork systems precariously glued together over decades. JPMorgan has tried to overcome this handicap with money. Its 2025 technology budget is $18 billion, more than the median amount of assets that U.S. banks hold, according to data connector MX Technologies.

Those investments have bolstered JPMorgan’s digital capabilities, but its ever-cautious CEO clearly sees more territory to defend. The bank recently told middlemen such as Yodlee, Finicity and Plaid that it will start collecting fees for information they access on behalf of consumers to sync with other banks and lending, investing and payment apps like Rocket, Robinhood and Venmo. The Bank Policy Institute, which lobbies on behalf of JPMorgan and its peers, also has legally challenged open-banking rules that would, among other things, prohibit such charges.

It’s understandable that the bank wants to protect its competitive moat and recoup some costs related to fraud protection and 2 billion monthly account access requests. JPMorgan also generated $34 billion of interchange fees from processing credit and debit card payments last year, which resulted in $5.5 billion of income after rewards for customers and outlays to partners. If users switch to making payments using electronic transfers, which are typically free, this revenue will shrink. More significantly, the easier and cheaper it is to connect outside vendors, the less likely customers will treat JPMorgan as a one-stop shop.

The amounts JPMorgan intends to charge have not been disclosed, but they will probably be prohibitive for some fintech firms, especially if other big U.S. banks follow suit. The risk for Dimon is that consumers resent incurring costs for their own data and find it harder to use various apps, while shining a brighter spotlight on JPMorgan’s clout. Although some analysts downplay the extra expense for aggregators, Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder Ben Horowitz, whose venture capital firm backs cryptocurrency trading and other financial startups, called it “horrible anticompetitive behavior.” Dimon’s fintech flex looks painfully overstretched.

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CONTEXT NEWS

JPMorgan has told financial-technology firms that it will start charging fees for access to customer bank account information that is used to send and receive money from payments, trading and other outside service providers, Bloomberg reported on July 11, citing unnamed sources.

The Bank Policy Institute, along with a bank and a state trade group on May 30 asked a U.S. court to throw out the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Section 1033 rule, which would, among other things, prohibit banks from charging fees to third-party entities for accessing customer account information. Plaintiffs allege that the CFPB overstepped its statutory authority and approved burdensome regulation.

The agency itself, which has been pared back under President Donald Trump, also filed documents with the court saying it has concluded the rule exceeds its authority. The Financial Technology Association has been granted permission by the court to step in and defend the rule.