How Chase fuelled a feud at JPMorgan

The success of Chase’s past merger ventures seemed to bode well for its link-up with JP Morgan. But those deals of the early 1990s had brought together commercial banks and didn’t have to reckon with integrating culturally alien investment bankers. On the execution front, the merger has proved messy, with blood-letting among JP Morganites in New York being matched by Chase losses in Europe. Beyond this – in itself enough to worry shareholders – there are concerns that underperforming JP Morgan was not the ideal medium for Chase’s equity market aspirations and that the deal was ill-timed, damaging Chase’s well-deserved reputation for clever risk-management skills in choppy markets.