Jamie Dimon said he’s helping Florida make billions of dollars every year, as JPMorgan Chase & Co. expands south.
The bank is renovating its offices in Tampa, a Florida city where it has more than 6,000 employees, in a project that will add $210 million to the local economy, Dimon said in his annual shareholder letter.
The bank’s chief executive officer took stock of several other efforts across the state, including $65 million in donations to local charities and a deal to name the home soccer stadium where Lionel Messi plays in Fort Lauderdale.
“Each year, we contribute billions of dollars to the economy, hire and train local residents, help to revitalize neighborhoods and remove barriers to opportunity for Floridians across the state,” Dimon said in a section of the letter titled “Powering Economic Growth in Florida.”
Florida has attracted scores of finance workers since the beginning of the pandemic, lured by low taxes, an abundance of sunshine and lax Covid restrictions. While most of the attention was focused on places like Miami and Palm Beach, other parts of the state also benefited from the largess.
JPMorgan will add about 9,000 square feet to its downtown Tampa office and do a “massive modernization” of the three buildings that it occupies at the nearby Highland Oaks campus, which houses one of the bank’s global payment centers, according to a spokesperson.
The bank has a workforce of 14,000 in Florida, according to Dimon’s letter. That compares to more than 30,000 employees in Texas, while New York’s total has slipped to fewer than 29,000. In February, Dimon praised Texas for its business-friendly policies. The average JPMorgan employee in Florida makes a salary of $87,000, more than twice the Florida average of $40,000.
“We’re proud that one-third of all Floridians do business with us through deposits, credit cards or a mortgage,” Dimon wrote in the letter.
