“Their track record is such that clients can be reasonably confident they’ll deliver on expectations,” he says.

Although asset management generates just 10 percent of revenue at JPMorgan, it’s become an increasingly attractive business for U.S. banks as regulators step up capital requirements, says Jason Goldberg, an analyst at Barclays Capital in New York. Under the 2010 Dodd-Frank law, banks have to hold more capital against risky activities, such as trading, beginning next year.

Build Capital

Companies are also building capital to meet new Federal Reserve rules beginning in 2016 that require the largest U.S. banks, including JPMorgan, to hold an extra buffer against an economic downturn.

“Asset management is a great business, particularly in the new environment,” Goldberg says. “It’s a high-return-on- equity, high-fee-income, global business that is not capital intensive and that’s growing.”

Erdoes was a standout even in high school, says Mary Crook, who taught her calculus at Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, an all-girls Catholic high school in Lake Forest, Illinois. She graduated No. 2 in her class and was an accomplished pianist, says Crook, who wrote Erdoes a recommendation for the mathematics program at Georgetown University in 1985.

Math Graduate

Erdoes was the only woman to graduate from Georgetown with a math degree in 1989. She went on to Harvard Business School for her Master of Business Administration.

Erdoes is a survivor at a bank whose senior management ranks have been thinned in the past four years by a series of shake-ups, including one following last year’s $6.2 billion-plus trading loss at the London-based chief investment office, which isn’t part of asset management. The scandal cost Ina Drew, the head of the unit, her job and in August resulted in criminal charges against trader Julien Grout and his supervisor, Javier Martin-Artajo, for wire fraud and other crimes.

Erdoes replaced James E. Staley as head of asset management in 2009, when he was promoted to run the investment bank. Staley, who left JPMorgan last year to join hedge-fund firm BlueMountain Capital Management LLC, says he first met Erdoes in 1999, when he took over JPMorgan’s private bank, where she had worked since joining JPMorgan in 1996 from Meredith, Martin & Kaye, a fixed-income advisory firm.