JPMorgan Chase seeks a way out of underperformance

At the end of last month, William Harrison, chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, announced sweeping changes to the senior management of the group’s investment banking division.

This follows 18 months of hard struggle to wring decent financial and stock market returns from the merger of JP Morgan and Chase. High credit costs, private-equity losses and weak investment banking revenues have dogged the newly combined firm. The institution that set out to establish itself as a new breed of global super-bank at the start of 2001 ended the year with an anaemic cash operating return on equity of just 10%.