‘Demoralized’
“The private bank was a pretty demoralized place,” Staley says. It was losing money, clients and assets. Staley says he would walk the private bank’s six floors late at night. “Amid the sea of empty desks, this one young woman was always there,” he says.
Erdoes, who was an adviser on short-term fixed-income investing at the time, replaced Staley as head of the private bank four years later. Assets in the unit, which serves ultra- high-net-worth individuals, swelled 88.9 percent from September 2009 to $340 billion at the end of June.
Erdoes says she’s a worrier. Her day starts around 5:30 a.m., scanning the overnight financial news. By 6:30, she’s in the office on calls with Asia and Europe as executives in those offices are winding down and before she runs the 8 a.m. global asset management call.
Throughout the day, Erdoes watches her team’s performance on five computer screens in her office, which is down the hall from CEO Dimon’s in the executive suite on the 48th floor of JPMorgan’s headquarters on Park Avenue in New York.
Don’t Be Lucky
“You worry just as much about great performance as you do about underperformance,” she says. “So we spend a lot of time making sure we know why we’re getting great performance. Are we getting it for the right reasons or for lucky reasons? You never want lucky reasons.”
JPMorgan runs the world’s sixth-biggest mutual fund company, according to Morningstar Inc. in Chicago. The bank says its mutual funds managed $407 billion as of June 30, up 59 percent since September 2009.
“If they’ve stood out in an area, it’s in bringing in assets,” says Laura Lallos, a senior mutual fund analyst at Morningstar. “They are proving very popular with investment advisers.”
Consistent Performer