Last week, a stream of employees gathered inside JPMorgan’s office in midtown Manhattan. They were there, according to the Wall Street Journal, to share their well wishes and admiration with Marianne Lake, the bank’s CEO of consumer and community banking. Earlier that morning, the bank had announced the elevation of two other executives to co-presidents—and Lake’s retirement after 25 years.
The announcement held more weight than a simple executive shuffle. JPMorgan has for years been searching, in a process that sometimes spills over into public view, for a successor to CEO Jamie Dimon. Lake had been a leading contender to take over from Dimon, and her elevation to CEO would have made her the first woman to run JPMorgan and the second to run a major Wall Street bank, after Citi’s promotion of Jane Fraser to CEO cracked that glass ceiling in 2021.
Dimon praised her as “an outstanding partner and friend,” noting her “unquestioned integrity” and decades of leadership. Yet with Lake’s departure, called “abrupt” by Bloomberg, JPMorgan has closed the door on what had been, for years, one of the most credible opportunities to put a woman at the helm of one of the most powerful financial institutions in the world.
