JPMorgan rules out more special pay awards for CEO Jamie Dimon

JPMorgan Chase said it would no longer award longtime chief executive Jamie Dimon any more special awards “in the future” following investor pushback to a $50mn award last year.

The bank made the commitment in a regulatory filing on Thursday, which also showed the Wall Street giant paid Dimon $34.5mn for his work 2022. This was unchanged from the prior year despite the company suffering its steepest decline in profits in more than a decade.

JPMorgan said Dimon, 66, was paid a base salary of $1.5mn and a $33mn performance-based bonus for 2022. The bank said its board of directors, which Dimon chairs, “considered his holistic performance across financial and non-financial performance dimensions” as part of determining his pay.

In 2022, JPMorgan reported record revenues but its full-year net income fell 22 per cent to $37.7bn, the bank’s biggest full-year drop in profits since 2008 amid an industry-wide slump in investment banking fees.

Nevertheless, the group reported an 18 per cent return on tangible equity, ahead of its target of about 17 per cent. JPMorgan shares also outperformed the benchmark S&P 500 index and the KBW Bank index, although the stock was still down 15.3 per cent for the year.

Pay for the bank’s top executives emerged as a thorny issue last year following a decision to award Dimon a one-off special award projected to be worth about $50mn over several years. This was in addition to the $34.5mn he was paid for 2021, which was his biggest pay packet since 2008.

A majority of shareholders ended up voting against the pay plan for the first time in a non-binding “say on pay” vote at the bank’s annual investor meeting.

Group-wide spending on pay rose 8 per cent in 2022 to $41.6bn, in line with the rate at which it grew its number of employees who totalled just under 294,000 at the end of the year.

For 2021, James Gorman at Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon were each paid $35mn, edging out Dimon as Wall Street’s highest-paid bank chief executive. Morgan Stanley and Goldman have yet to disclose their chief executive pay plans for 2022.

Dimon has been head of JPMorgan since 2006, making him one of Wall Street’s longest-serving leaders. Forbes pegs his net worth at roughly $1.6bn, much of which is in the bank’s stock.