For Marianne Lake, innovation is not a straight line.
"You can zig, you can zag, you can bob, you can weave, you can iterate and that's how you get to the right place," Lake said during a moderated discussion held on JPMorgan Chase's "Women on the Move" leadership day in October 2021.
The yardsticks measuring innovation, however, have largely moved in one direction — up — since Lake became co-CEO in May 2021 for consumer and community banking at New York-based JPMorgan, the country's largest bank by assets. Lake oversees cards, mortgages and auto lending, while her co-CEO, Jennifer Piepszak, takes responsibility for consumer banking, business banking and U.S. wealth management.
Chase Card Services, the largest card issuer in the U.S., ended 2021 with 47 million active accounts and saw a customer retention rate of 98%. The company also has made inroads with millennial and Gen Z customers, who now represent about 45% of Chase's customer base.
In home lending, Chase has seen originations grow more than 50% over the last two years, due, in part, to a strong housing market. The bank originated $163 billion in loans in 2021. It also surpassed the $745 billion mark for servicing.
Originations in the auto lending business grew more than 30% in 2021, due, in part, to private-label relationships with Subaru, Jaguar, Land Rover, Maserati and Aston Martin.
The company also is positioning itself for the future of the car, which looks increasingly electric. In July — about a month before California regulators moved to phase out gasoline-only vehicles by 2035 — Chase unveiled a website to help consumers shop for electric vehicles.
Dubbed the Electric Vehicle Education Center, the site offers details on EVs themselves, as well as help in calculating the cost of ownership and navigating government incentive programs for EV adoption.
The bank also launched a platform for customers to digitally shop, buy and finance vehicles. More than 500,000 people engaged with the platform in March, up 30% year over year.
The innovations help Chase keep up with competition that, in Lake's view, is everywhere.
"It's how they order a pizza; it's how they order a car. It's all those things that inform what customers think extraordinary experience looks like and what value outside of the transaction looks like," Lake said. "That's what matters to our customers."
Even as it devotes resources to online ventures, Chase has been committed to expanding its branch network. In 2021, it became the first U.S. bank with branches in all 48 lower states. The bank also remains on track to meet a goal set in 2019: 400 new branches in 25 states. The expansion has included what Chase calls Community Center branches, which look to expand access to banking in Black, Hispanic and Latino communities.
"They often include local artwork and architecture, and the majority are built with minority contractors as part of the firm's efforts to engage more diverse vendors," Lake said.
Lake and Piepszak, who are considered potential successors to JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, say they have had a strong working relationship as co-CEOs. They have similar professional backgrounds and both have been the company's CFO at one point.
In addition to her role leading the consumer bank at Chase, Lake is co-founder of Women on the Move. The JPMorgan initiative is focused on expanding women-run businesses, improving women's financial health and supporting women's career advancement.
She is also the operating committee sponsor of the Women on the Move Interactive Network, the largest employee business resource group at JPMorgan, and of Parents@JPMC, which provides resources for working parents at the company, which employs more than 270,000 people around the world.
For the past seven years, Lake has led the company's participation in Cycle for Survival, a fundraiser for rare-cancer research at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. Some 2,000 JPMorgan employees take part each year.
The bank, meanwhile, is more than halfway toward its goal of funneling $30 billion toward racial equity and inclusive growth, a five-year target announced in October 2020. At the end of 2021, JPMorgan had committed or deployed more than $18 billion, largely for preservation of affordable rental housing and homeownership refinancing.
"There is work still to do — and we know that our dedication to racial equity will extend well beyond the five-year milestone in 2025," Lake said. "The most important thing is that the changes we're making are sustainable and will drive real progress long term."
