Jamie Dimon’s right hand man is ready to lead JP Morgan—but time is not on his side

Then, in March 2020, a heart attack and emergency heart surgery sidelined Dimon, and Pinto and Gordon Smith (JPMorgan’s head of the consumer business) took over the reins, successfully steering the company through the first months of Covid and the global financial crisis that followed. It was a pivotal moment in Pinto’s career. He became the face of the company during that stint, and has since been a regular on lists of who is most likely to succeed Dimon. Though Pinto has long brushed off whispers of him becoming the next CEO of JPMorgan, it’s hard not to note he finally relocated to New York two years ago, and has been living there with his wife ever since.

Last month Dimon named Pinto his “hit-by-a-bus” replacement, and at a meeting in Brooklyn last week, he told a room of investors Pinto “could run the bank tomorrow.” That same day, just across the East River in Manhattan, Pinto, whose $30 million compensation is the second-highest at JPMorgan (Dimon’s is $36 million) told an audience of bankers, “I’m working with Jamie during the day to day, and focused in all these areas, including technology, including artificial intelligence, every part of the company, to make sure the company that is performing very, very well continues on the same path.”

But just as a talented back-up quarterback can spend the prime of their career waiting for a star to leave the field, executives can likewise miss their window if the boss upstairs sticks around for too long. Now 61-years-old, Pinto is seen in some circles as too old for the job. Dimon was only 49 years old when he took over the helm. Adding to the intrigue, Dimon identified Pinto as “a key executive who is immediately ready to fulfill the responsibilities of the CEO” in the same letter to investors that identified newly promoted Jennifer Piepszak, Troy Rohrbaugh, Marianne Lake and Mary Erdoes as “strong potential CEO candidates.”

One report, which a long-time colleague of Pinto disputes, argued the repositioning passed over some of Pinto’s closest colleagues, eroding Pinto’s influence. Of the three executives identified as Pinto favorites, none are still with the company. So for now, Pinto occupies a strange place in one of Corporate America’s most powerful C-suites: He’s the CEO-in-waiting, who might be waiting forever.

Unofficial training program

Born in Argentina in December 1962, Pinto grew up amid hyperinflation measured not in years, but hours. As he was finishing high school in 1982, the Falklands War broke out as Argentina and the United Kingdom fought for ownership of several strategically important islands. Having just turned 18 he was drafted into the military and trained as a soldier, though a source who knows Pinto says he never actually fought in the war.

Even while serving in the military Pinto enrolled at the Universidad Nacional de Lomas de Zamora in Buenos Aires. When the war ended in June of 1982 he took a job as a financial analyst and foreign exchange trader at bank holding conglomerate Manufacturers Hanover where he worked his way through school, eventually earning a bachelor’s degree in public accounting and business administration. He was 19 years old when he took the job, and never really left.

The same year New York-based Chemical Bank bought Manufacturers Hanover, in 1992, Pinto was appointed head of sales for the acquiring company. “Clearly, at that time, I didn’t imagine that job was going to lead me here,” he told Brunswick. He worked his way up to head trader and eventually treasurer of Chemical Bank in Mexico, where he and his wife moved.

Then, in 1996, Chemical Bank bought JP Morgan, adopting the former’s better-known name. Pinto moved to London to oversee local markets in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia for JPMorgan’s retail bank, Chase Manhattan, briefly leaving his family behind while he got them settled in their new home. The strain of speaking English in a new country left him exhausted at the end of every week. “It was really, really tough,” he said. “But after adapting, I loved it.”

The change of location kicked off more than two decades of rapidly moving through the highest echelons of JPMorgan’s executive team. In 1998 he helped the bank manage the volatile markets of the Russian Financial Crisis that saw the ruble devalued and the nation default on its debt. In 2006 he was promoted to JPMorgan’s global head of emerging markets and two years later added the duties of the head of the global credit trading and syndicate business. When JPMorgan bought Bear Sterns in 2008 amid the fall-out surrounding the Great Recession, Pinto briefly served as a director helping manage the integration and wind-down of the company.

By 2009 he was at last initiated into JPMorgan’s unofficial training program, which promotes executives to a shared leadership role where they vie for senior roles. That year he became co-head of the global fixed income group for the investment bank, then the sole head. In 2012 he became the co-CEO of the Corporate & Investment Bank, then two years later the sole CEO. In 2018 he was named co-president, along with Gordon Smith, and chief operating officer of JPMorgan, where he first started working closely with Jamie Dimon.

But before he could be promoted to sole president of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon had a heart attack. It was the spring of 2020 and whispers about Covid, then known as the 2019 novel coronavirus, were quickly spreading around the world. As Dimon was rushed to emergency surgery, Pinto and Smith were given control. During their few months in charge, the pair made the controversial decision to let bank staff work from home. They also transacted $11 trillion of payments a day, according to a letter Pinto sent to investors, and over one two-month period helped clients raise $940 billion.

Strange incentives

By the time Dimon returned, Pinto, whose staff declined to comment for this story, had learned a valuable lesson about leading the bank. In April 2021 he told Bloomberg the experience taught him that during stressful times “you need to be supported to be able to make strong decisions—in some cases, different to what other companies of other people are doing. You really need to be able to execute relentlessly and move the company forward.”

Though Pinto should have been in high spirits after successfully helping lead the company, the same April he spoke about his lessons learned, he became embroiled in one of the most difficult deals of his career. He had greenlit a €3.25 billion loan to help build the much maligned Super League of European football, which sought to unite the continent’s myriad leagues. Three days later the deal was dead following outrage from Prince William and the Prime Ministers of France and Italy who didn’t want to see their favorite leagues destroyed. “It is clear we misjudged the magnitude of feeling that this deal would create,” Pinto told Bloomberg. “And we will learn from this experience.”

The following year, in January 2022, Pinto became JPMorgan’s sole president. Before the year was over, he received 750,000 restricted stock options, then worth $25 million—that would vest if he stayed on until 2026.

Complicating questions around succession though, Dimon will receive twice that if he stays on until the same year, something which is exceedingly unlikely. In an interview earlier this year at the AllianceBernstein Strategic Decisions conference Dimon said he’d step down in fewer than five years, leaving Pinto to vie for the position against a wave of younger execs now also being mentored. It’s possible Dimon could stay on as chairman to continue that mentorship, and to earn that extra payout.

This article was updated to clarify the vesting date of Jamie Dimon and Daniel Pinto’s stocks