JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s Mary Callahan Erdoes got her first assignment managing money when she was 6 years old. The eldest of four children, Erdoes showed an early aptitude for math that was fostered at her grandmother Kay’s suburban Chicago breakfast table, where she helped balance her grandparents’ checkbook on an adding machine.

“It was my first foray into money management,” Erdoes, 46, says.

Today, Erdoes oversees $2.2 trillion as chief executive officer of JPMorgan Asset Management, the sixth-largest money management operation in the U.S., according to data compiled by Pensions & Investments, a publication that caters to the industry. Erdoes’s unit includes everything from 401(k) assets to hedge funds, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its October issue. It produced a 24 percent return on equity last year compared with 9.7 percent at BlackRock Inc., the largest U.S. money manager, and 15.4 percent at Fidelity Investments.

JPMorgan Asset Management’s profit, before provisions for credit losses, was up 14 percent from 2009 to $2.8 billion in 2012, compared with a 37.5 percent decline at the larger bank.

Total client assets rose 29.2 percent from September 2009, when Erdoes took the helm, to the end of June. JPMorgan oversaw $1.47 trillion directly plus $687 billion in client money invested with other firms.

“The flows are coming from every single region that we have around the world, and, equally important, they are coming from every single channel and every single product,” Erdoes says.

Low Profile

Compared with her outspoken boss, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Erdoes keeps a low public profile. Yet she’s among the most powerful and respected executives in finance, says bank analyst Michael Holland, chairman of Holland & Co., a long-term investor in JPMorgan.

“Quietly, she is a force, one of the most influential executives in the business,” Holland says. “Jamie Dimon promotes people who are the best at what they do. She is the best.”

Neil Rue, a managing director at Pension Consulting Alliance Inc. in Portland, Oregon, says that under Erdoes, JPMorgan has risen from a middling player in pensions to the top of the heap.

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