The company sold roughly 280 million shares at HKUSD 48.56 apiece, raising about HKUSD 13.6 billion, or USD 1.74 billion, and valuing itself at around USD 26.5 billion at the offer price.

That was below the top of its marketed range of HKUSD 49.50, and it was still one of the city’s biggest new share sales this year.

The first session was not kind. The stock fell by as much as 10% to HKUSD 43.80 before recovering to close at HKUSD 48.50, a whisker below its issue price and a valuation of about USD 26.3 billion.

Analysts attributed the rebound to stabilisation measures of the sort large listings use to avoid a bruising debut, with Goldman Sachs acting as stabilising manager.

It closed at HKUSD 46 on the second day while the Hang Seng Index finished flat, and by the close on September 3 it was changing hands around HKUSD 42, some 13% below where it was priced.

Chief financial officer Leigh Gui told the listing ceremony that the debut marked “a new starting point”. Founder and chief executive Sky Xu stayed out of the spotlight and let his executives speak.

The price is the story
The headline comparison is unavoidable. At roughly USD 26.5 billion, Shein came to market more than 70% below the USD 98.2 billion it was worth in private funding rounds in 2022.

That gap has been reported as a humiliation, which is only half right. A private mark from 2022 records what one pool of capital paid in one liquidity environment. It is not a benchmark. The more revealing numbers come from the book itself.

The post IF Insights: Shein finally lists, and Hong Kong marks it down appeared first on International Finance.

The long-awaited final Chinese regulatory approval for the business could be granted around ‌the time of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s planned visit to Washington to meet with his American counterpart Donald Trump, reported Reuters.

The American bank, which offers corporate, institutional, and other banking services in China, in 2021, applied for a wholly-owned mainland Chinese brokerage unit licence as part of its push to ramp up its presence in the world’s second-largest economy.

“Citi, which has been hiring for the business over the last couple of years in preparation for the licence, aims to roughly double the headcount to around 100 people by the end of this year,” stated Reuters, while citing a source.

The ⁠regulatory approval from Beijing, if it happens this month, would see Citi competing with Wall Street rivals including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley for a share of growing and increasingly profitable onshore securities trading and underwriting deals in the world’s second-largest economy.

Citi’s aggressive attempt to establish a solid presence in China’s brokerage market comes at a time when the Asian giant is witnessing a growing list of technology and other companies tapping domestic equity markets for fundraising and attracting increased fund flows into the stock markets.

Wall Street giants, irrespective of the growing Sino-US geopolitical rivalry, have been expanding in the world’s second-largest economy.

The Xi Jinping administration also sees the growing access of American firms to its financial sector as a mean to attract more capital inflows.

As part of its China expansion, Citigroup will be adding personnel, including senior front-office bankers and support staff. Reports indicate that Citi will achieve this through a mix via a combination of internal transfers and external hires.

For the China brokerage unit, Citi also plans to relocate some of its bankers from Hong Kong and other Asian markets, apart from moving some of its existing mainland staff to the new business.

Citi’s American rivals are already gaining significantly in China. In 2025, profits at the wholly-owned ‌China securities ⁠unit of Goldman Sachs nearly tripled to 1.46 billion yuan (USD 217.39 million), while JPMorgan’s almost quadrupled to 984 million yuan. Morgan Stanley’s profit, on the other hand, soared sevenfold to 138 million yuan.

All three banks benefitted from surging securities trading revenue primarily from institutional clients.

Citi’s new China business unit will reportedly be seeking a regulatory nod to conduct A-share brokerage, underwriting, research, and principal trading businesses in the onshore market.

As per the sources, those offerings would complement the Wall Street giant’s existing offshore-focused team for investment banking in China that supports domestic companies’ financing activities in overseas markets.

The ⁠bank also plans to lean on its onshore corporate and commercial banking client base, which it already serves in areas such as foreign exchange, cash management, and trade finance, to win A-share equity and M&A mandates.

Citi’s new China unit will focus on sectors including technology, healthcare, and consumer and financial institutions, targeting the Asian giant’s established corporate “champions” as well as emerging players including AI and chip companies.

Citi would be entering a hyper-competitive domain, where, in addition to its Wall Street rivals, Chinese brokerages also introduce new offerings rapidly.
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The post Citi’s China brokerage push set to intensify competition in local market appeared first on International Finance.

The company reported preliminary quarterly revenue of more than USD 11.5 billion, compared with USD 787 million a year earlier and USD 4.73 billion in the first quarter of 2026, according to documents seen by Bloomberg News.

The post Anthropic revenue surges ahead of IPO as company eyes Decart AI acquisition appeared first on International Finance.

According to compensation consultancy Johnson Associates, bonuses for equity traders and equity capital markets bankers are projected to rise by between 20% and 30% this year, the largest increase across Wall Street. Bankers advising on mergers and acquisitions are expected to receive payouts that are 15% to 20% higher than in 2025.

The upbeat outlook follows a strong earnings season for the largest US banks, driven by robust trading volumes, a resurgence in corporate dealmaking and increased underwriting activity.

“Most of the excitement is coming from the equity side, with stock markets at record highs and volatility increasing trading volume,” said Alan Johnson, founder of Johnson Associates.

Investment and commercial bankers are expected to see bonus growth of at least 10% to 15%, while fixed-income traders could receive increases of between 7.5% and 12.5%. Compensation for bankers underwriting bonds and loans is forecast to rise by between 5% and 10%.

The recovery in dealmaking has been one of the biggest drivers of higher compensation. Years of subdued mergers and acquisitions activity have given way to a growing pipeline of transactions, generating substantial fees for Wall Street firms.

Among the year’s biggest mandates was SpaceX’s blockbuster initial public offering (IPO), which reportedly created a fee pool of around USD 500 million. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which led the deal, are estimated to have earned roughly USD 100 million each, while Bank of America, Citigroup and JPMorgan collected about USD 75 million apiece.

Johnson said the resilience of the US economy had surprised many bankers, despite geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, inflationary pressures and shifting expectations around interest rates.

The post Trading, dealmaking booms to hand Wall Street bankers bumper bonuses, says consultancy appeared first on International Finance.

A float in September or October is the widely reported working assumption, although the pace of the past fortnight has put an August debut within reach. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan are joint sponsors.

The number that stands out is the valuation. Shein was worth USD 98.2 billion after a private round in 2022 and USD 64 billion after another in 2024.

It is now seeking USD 40 billion to USD 50 billion, and some shareholders have reportedly pushed for a figure closer to USD 30 billion. A draft prospectus published in late July explains the argument.

What Shein actually does
Shein sells very cheap clothing, and a great deal else, straight to shoppers through an app and website. It was founded in China in 2012 by Sky Yangtian Xu, who remains chairman and chief executive, and is now headquartered in Singapore.

It owns almost no factories. Instead it runs a network of mostly Chinese suppliers, feeds them live demand data and orders tiny production runs.

The listing document calls the system large-scale automated test and reorder, or LATR. New products typically launch in batches of 100 to 200 units, response is tracked in real time, and anything that sells can be restocked in as little as five days. Anything that does not is quietly dropped.

That machinery served about 273 million active customers across roughly 160 markets in 2025, up from 186 million in 2023. Clothing remains the core, although its share of revenue has slipped from 68.8% in 2023 to 63.8% in 2025 as beauty, homeware and small electronics have grown.

A third-party marketplace now sits alongside Shein’s own label, and service revenue from those sellers has jumped from USD 868 million in 2023 to USD 4.7 billion in 2025.

Growth that ran into a wall
The growth was real. Revenue climbed from USD 32.1 billion in 2023 to USD 38.8 billion in 2024 and USD 41.9 billion in 2025, a compound annual rate of 14.2%. Shein overtook H&M on revenue and closed in on Inditex, the owner of Zara, in barely a decade.

Then the rules changed. In May 2025 Washington scrapped the de minimis exemption for parcels from China and Hong Kong, and by that August had removed the waiver for every country.

Shipments worth under USD 800 had for nearly a decade entered the United States duty free with light customs scrutiny. A 2023 congressional report estimated Shein and Temu were together behind more than 30% of all such packages arriving daily. The exemption was not a bonus. It was part of the model.

Europe followed. From 1 July 2026 the European Union scrapped its own €150 duty waiver, replacing it with a flat 3 euro charge per item type, an interim measure running to 2028 while a permanent system is built. Nearly 5.9 billion low-value items entered the bloc duty free in 2025, more than four times the 2022 figure.

The financials investors will pick over
Growth has now stalled. First-quarter revenue in 2026 rose just 1.1% to USD 9 billion. Operating profit fell 26% to USD 258 million as marketing and fulfilment costs climbed against flat sales, dragging the operating margin to 2.9% from 3.9%. Net income for 2025 had already fallen 39% to USD 2.06 billion.

The headline USD 99 million quarterly loss is less alarming than it looks in isolation. Most of it stems from a USD 328 million non-cash fair-value charge on convertible redeemable preferred shares, which convert to ordinary stock at listing. Strip that out and the company is still profitable.

The harder problem is the underlying trend, a business earning under three cents of operating profit on every dollar of sales while its two largest markets tighten import rules simultaneously.

There is a second signal. Customer numbers keep climbing, but each shopper still places about four orders a year, as in 2023, slipping to 3.9 in the twelve months to March 2026. Shein is recruiting customers, not getting more out of them.

Europe is now the biggest market
The geographic shift is the filing’s most consequential detail. Europe overtook the United States as Shein’s largest market in 2024, with revenue rising from USD 10.2 billion in 2023 to USD 14.8 billion in 2025, or 35.4% of the total. American revenue fell to 24.1% in 2025 and dropped a further 14% to USD 2 billion in the first quarter of 2026.

Europe is not simply a fallback. Shein reported 155.7 million average monthly users across the bloc for the six months to January 2026, comfortably ahead of Temu, with France, Spain and Italy supplying the largest user bases and Germany the most revenue.

Even here the pace has eased, with user growth slowing to 6.9%. The awkward part is that Europe is now the market applying the tightest regulatory pressure, and the euro 3 duty landed weeks before the prospectus.

The rest of the world now accounts for the largest slice of all at 40.5%, or USD 16.9 billion. Brazil is the standout, although the local manufacturing programme Shein began there in 2023 has been bumpier than planned, with many factories walking away over pricing and turnaround demands.

What Shein has that its rivals do not
Against Temu, the advantage is depth rather than breadth. Temu runs a managed marketplace matching existing inventory to buyers. Shein sits inside the production process itself, which tightens control over design, cost and restocking, and locks suppliers in.

Against Zara, H&M and Primark, the advantage is inventory risk. Traditional retailers commit to seasons months ahead. Shein commits to a few hundred pieces.

Both advantages are built on the Guangdong supplier cluster, and both are harder to replicate abroad, as Brazil has shown. The field is crowding regardless, with AliExpress, Amazon’s discount tier and TikTok Shop chasing the same young, mobile-first shopper. What still separates Shein is that it is a fashion platform first.

Five things to watch in the IPO
It’s important to look at margins over revenue. At 2.9%, the operating margin leaves almost no cushion for further duty increases.

Pricing discipline in the book. Analysts widely doubt Shein will secure much uplift on its 2024 private valuation of USD 64 billion.

IDG Capital and HSG, the rebranded Sequoia Capital China, are the two largest institutional holders at 7.9% and 5.8%, ahead of Tiger Global, General Atlantic, Boyu, Coatue and DST. A soft debut would sting all of them.

Governance is also worth keeping an eye on. Donald Tang, previously executive chairman and the public face of the company in Washington and London, does not appear among directors or senior management.

Regulators in Europe are another hurdle. The European Commission opened Digital Services Act proceedings against Shein in February 2026 over illegal product listings and addictive design. France moved to suspend the platform in late 2025. Mandatory product identifiers arrive in November 2026.

Whether growth outside the West holds is also a big question. Europe and the United States together make up more than half of revenue and both are slowing, leaving the near-term story to Latin America, the Middle East and Asia.

Will US-China tensions derail it
Not the listing itself. That is the point of Hong Kong. New York and London proved impossible precisely because of political scrutiny, and a Hong Kong float sidesteps the American disclosure regime entirely. The trade-off is a narrower investor base and a valuation that reflects it.

The business is a different matter, and the exposure is severe. Shein does not control the rules that set its cost base. The current US-China truce, which cut the effective tariff rate on Chinese goods from around 41% to 31%, runs only to November 10 2026, weeks after Shein expects to list.

Both sides have been working to preserve it, including talks on agricultural tariffs in July, but a lapse would hit Shein’s American unit economics immediately.

The deeper risk is that de minimis repeal is not a US-China issue at all. Europe has done the same thing for its own reasons, and Britain follows in 2028. Shein’s answer is to push more inventory into local warehouses, expand its marketplace and lean on markets where tariffs are not yet the binding constraint.

Investors will decide within weeks whether that answer is worth USD 40 billion.

The post IF Insights: Shein’s Hong Kong IPO faces its hardest sell yet appeared first on International Finance.

Few chief executives anywhere have become so bound up with the company they run that markets have coined a phrase for the value they personally add to the stock price.

That phrase is the “Jamie Premium.” And this summer, it is being put to its biggest test yet, as JPMorgan edges towards becoming the first bank in history to touch a USD 1 trillion market valuation.

The bank’s roots go back to 1799. Understanding how it got here means understanding the man who has run it for the last twenty years.

Who Is Jamie Dimon
James “Jamie” Dimon was born in New York City in 1956, the son of a stockbroker at American Express. He has said he picked up the language of markets at the family dinner table long before he ever set foot on a trading floor.

After Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, he joined Sandy Weill, the dealmaker who spent the 1980s and 90s stitching together what would eventually become Citigroup. Dimon was Weill’s right hand through most of it.

Then it fell apart. Weill fired Dimon in 1998, ending a 15-year working relationship that had, until that point, looked unshakeable. Dimon later said the episode hit his net worth harder than his self-worth, which is a tidy line for a man who spent the next 18 months weighing his options, including a serious conversation with Jeff Bezos about joining Amazon.

He chose banking instead. In March 2000, he took over as CEO of Bank One, a troubled Chicago lender that one analyst at the time said even Hercules couldn’t fix. Dimon put USD 60 million of his own money into the stock on his first day, cut costs, tightened up risk controls, and turned a bank that had posted a USD 511 million loss into one earning USD 3.5 billion within three years.

That turnaround caught JPMorgan’s attention. The two banks merged in 2004, and by the end of 2005, Dimon was CEO of the combined JPMorgan Chase. He took the chairman’s title a year later and has not left either post since, making him the longest-serving chief executive among America’s biggest banks by a considerable distance.

The Moves That Built an Empire
Dimon’s reputation was not built in the good years. It was built in 2008. While most of Wall Street was either drowning or being bailed out, JPMorgan went shopping.

In March that year, as Bear Stearns teetered on collapse, JPMorgan agreed to buy the storied investment bank for close to USD 1.4 billion, a fire-sale price backed by emergency Federal Reserve financing.

Six months later, Washington Mutual failed, still the largest bank collapse in US history, and JPMorgan bought its banking operations for roughly USD 1.9 billion.

Neither deal was clean. Both came loaded with legal exposure and legacy mortgage problems that JPMorgan spent years, and billions of dollars, untangling with regulators afterwards.

Dimon himself later grumbled that the two acquisitions became a convenient scapegoat for legal headaches the bank had inherited rather than caused. Still, the strategic logic held up. Lehman Brothers was gone.

Merrill Lynch had been sold in a rushed weekend deal. Wachovia had failed. JPMorgan, in the space of a single terrible year, had added a top-tier investment bank and a huge consumer deposit base while nearly everyone else on the street was shrinking.

The bank’s next real stress test came in 2012, when a botched derivatives trade out of its London office, the so-called “London Whale,” cost more than USD 6 billion and briefly dented Dimon’s reputation for having risk under control. He didn’t dress it up.

“The London Whale was the stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of,” he wrote in his 2013 shareholder letter, a rare moment of a Wall Street chief executive owning a failure in plain language rather than corporate hedging.

He testified before Congress, rebuilt the risk function, and moved on. It remains the closest JPMorgan has come to a genuine credibility crisis on his watch, which says something, given how long that watch has now run.

What followed was less dramatic but arguably more important. Dimon built what the bank now calls its “fortress balance sheet,” a deliberately conservative capital cushion meant to absorb shocks that would sink less careful rivals. He had been saying as much for years.

“It’s hard to predict when a storm will happen, but one thing is inevitable, it will happen,” he wrote in a shareholder letter back in 2002, long before most of Wall Street took the warning seriously.

That philosophy was tested again in March 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank both collapsed within weeks of each other. Dimon personally led efforts to organise a rescue for First Republic.

When that rescue failed, JPMorgan bought the bank’s assets and deposits outright, adding yet another chunk of the US consumer banking market to its own.

He also pushed the bank hard into technology, spending billions annually on digital banking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, and built out its investment banking and trading arms so JPMorgan could compete seriously on both Wall Street dealmaking and Main Street lending at once, a combination few of its rivals can match at the same scale.

Record Numbers, Record Milestone
All of that is what has JPMorgan sitting at the edge of a historic number right now. In the second quarter of 2026, the bank posted net income of USD 21.2 billion, the highest quarterly profit any American bank has ever reported.

Total managed revenue climbed 27% year-on-year to USD 58 billion, helped by a surge in trading revenue, a rebound in investment banking fees, and a large one-time gain on the bank’s Visa stake. Strip that gain out and adjusted profit was still USD 16.9 billion, with a return on tangible common equity of 23%.

Loans grew 9% to USD 1.54 trillion. Deposits rose to USD 2.71 trillion. Credit quality, meanwhile, actually improved slightly, with card loss rates ticking down year-on-year, which suggests the growth isn’t coming from looser lending standards.

Put it together and JPMorgan’s market capitalisation sat at roughly USD 920 to 935 billion in mid-July 2026, within touching distance of USD 1 trillion. No bank has ever crossed that line. Getting there would put JPMorgan in a club currently occupied almost entirely by technology giants like Tesla, Meta, and Broadcom.

For context, JPMorgan’s current valuation is roughly equal to the combined market value of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup, three of its biggest domestic rivals, added together.

Explaining the “Jamie Premium”
Which brings us back to the Jamie Premium. It isn’t an official financial metric. You won’t find it in a filing. It’s a term analysts and investors use to describe the extra value the market attaches to JPMorgan simply because Dimon is the one running it, over and above what the bank’s underlying numbers alone would justify.

Investors and analysts have pegged that premium at somewhere between 10% and 15% of the stock’s value, a real sum given the size of the company.

The idea makes sense once you break it down. Buying JPMorgan stock isn’t just a bet on the bank’s assets and earnings. It’s also a bet on the judgement of the person deciding where that capital goes and how much risk to take with it, particularly through the next crisis nobody can yet see coming.

Dimon has now steered the bank through the 2008 crash, the European debt scare, a pandemic, the 2023 regional banking wobble, and a string of geopolitical shocks, without a single full-year loss along the way.

That record shows up in how the market prices the stock. When Dimon told an investor conference the shares were “very valuable,” traders piled in within hours, sending JPMorgan’s stock sharply higher.

There’s a catch, though. A premium built around one man is also a risk concentrated in one man. Dimon has spoken openly about succession, and the board has already said it plans to eventually split the chairman and CEO roles once he steps back.

Most analysts expect at least part of the Jamie Premium to fade whenever that handover happens, no matter how capable the next person turns out to be. Two decades of proven judgement isn’t something a successor can simply inherit on day one.

That day hasn’t come yet. For now, JPMorgan is standing at the edge of a milestone no bank has ever reached, carrying both the payoff of twenty years of disciplined, occasionally opportunistic leadership and the pressure of having almost no margin left for a mistake.

The post Business Leader of the Week: Inside Jamie Dimon’s rewiring of JPMorgan into Wall Street giant appeared first on International Finance.

For an outfit that spent two decades avoiding public markets altogether, the turnaround has been dizzying: An initial public offering (IPO) on June 12. Barely a month later, a seat among the hundred largest non-financial names on the Nasdaq exchange.

The speed owes everything to a rule change. Until 2026, newly-listed companies faced a waiting period of at least three months before they could be considered for index inclusion.

In May, Nasdaq rewrote that playbook, allowing eligible mega-IPOs to join after just 15 trading days. The shift was widely read as tailor-made for SpaceX, whose listing was always going to be too large for index providers to ignore.

TD Securities’ head of index and market structure research, Peter Haynes, noted that exchanges had to revisit their rulebooks given the sheer scale of the offering.

That scale is hard to overstate. SpaceX’s initial public offering was the largest in history, and the company entered the market with a valuation north of USD 2 trillion, making it the sixth-largest publicly traded stock in the United States.

The listing also made Elon Musk the world’s first trillionaire, at least briefly – though a subsequent slide in the shares has since trimmed his fortune to an estimated $973 billion, according to Forbes.

Why this matters for ordinary investors
More than 200 investment products, holding a combined USD 800 billion in assets, track the Nasdaq 100. Any fund built to mirror the index is now obliged to buy SpaceX shares, meaning millions of savers with exposure to funds, such as Invesco’s QQQ and QQQM – and by extension, many workplace pension and retirement schemes – will own a slice of the company whether they intended to, or not.

Estimates of exactly how much forced buying this triggers vary widely. JPMorgan has put the passive demand tied to Nasdaq 100 inclusion at around USD 4.3 billion, while BNP Paribas estimates the wider buying across all Nasdaq-100 trackers could approach USD 8 billion. Even so, most analysts caution against expecting fireworks. SpaceX’s weightage in the index is likely to land at around 1%, some way behind established giants such as Nvidia and Amazon, which carries roughly a 4% weightage despite a comparable market capitalisation.

The gap comes down to free float (the proportion of shares actually available for public trading, as opposed to those held by insiders or still restricted). Only a small fraction of SpaceX’s stock was released in the IPO, which caps how much weight it can currently carry in a benchmark built on tradeable shares rather than headline valuation. Should more shares enter circulation over time, that weightage, and its influence on the index’s performance, would be expected to grow.

A volatile debut
SpaceX shares have already lived several lifetimes since listing. The stock surged by roughly half in its first three days of trading, only to surrender almost all of those gains within days. Analysts broadly expect the turbulence to continue rather than settle.

JJ Kinahan, senior vice-president at derivatives exchange Cboe, told CNBC that investors should brace for share-price swings of around USD 20 in either direction over short periods, a reminder that big moves cut both ways.

Some of that volatility stems from a wall of expiring lockups. Restrictions preventing insiders from selling are due to lift in tranches between 70 and 135 days after the IPO, creating a potential source of new selling pressure just as index-related buying tapers off.

Provisions covering Musk’s own shares, along with those of other large early investors, remain locked for a full year.

Susquehanna analyst Charles Minervino has described the rolling lockup expiries as a near-term overhang likely to weigh on sentiment.

Not everyone is convinced the index inclusion itself will move the needle much. Paul Meeks of Freedom Capital Markets argued that because the mechanics of index buying are entirely formulaic and well understood by the market in advance, the actual effect may prove less dramatic than headlines suggest.

Analysts at Jefferies and 22V Research have made similar points, suggesting the low float means passive purchases will fall short of what many investors initially assumed.

The bull and bear case
History offers some comfort to shareholders. Over the past decade, the 92 stocks added to the Nasdaq 100 delivered average returns of around 10% in the six months following inclusion, and 18% over 12 months, as tracking funds bought in and momentum traders followed. Whether SpaceX repeats that pattern is another question entirely.

Sceptics point to the valuation itself. SpaceX’s business spans satellite internet through Starlink, rocket launches, and – since a February merger with Musk’s xAI – a fast-growing artificial intelligence arm. Revenue reached $18.7 billion last year, up 33% on 2025, yet the company posted a net loss of USD 4.9 billion.

Some analysts have questioned whether a valuation built substantially on projected AI revenues, including ambitions around orbital data centres, is sustainable at current multiples. Morningstar has gone as far as valuing the company at roughly half its IPO debut price.

For now, the practical upshot for most investors is straightforward: Anyone holding a fund that tracks the Nasdaq 100 now owns a small piece of SpaceX, whether they sought that exposure out, or not.

What happens next – to the share price, the float, and the wider index – will be watched as closely by pension savers as by professional traders, if for very different reasons.

The post SpaceX joins the Nasdaq 100: What investors need to know appeared first on International Finance.

Doug Petno, the bank’s co-chief executive of commercial and investment banking, said the lender expects rebuilding and economic diversification across the region to require hundreds of billions of dollars once the conflict ends, creating significant opportunities for banks, investors, and capital markets.

“We’ve deployed significantly more capital and expanded our risk limits across the region,” Petno told Abu Dhabi-based newspaper The National. He said the move reflects both the immediate financing needs created by the conflict and JPMorgan’s long-term confidence in the Gulf’s growth prospects.

While the bank did not disclose how much it had adjusted its risk appetite, Petno said teams were working country by country to assess financing requirements as governments and businesses prepare for major capital expenditure programs.

“Funding could come from JPMorgan’s balance sheet, public debt markets, or private capital, depending on the nature of each project,” he said, adding that the overall financing requirement would become clearer after the conflict ends.

The bank expects reconstruction spending to focus on energy infrastructure, logistics networks, data centers, and artificial intelligence-related projects, alongside broader investments aimed at strengthening the region’s digital and economic resilience.

The conflict, which began in the last week of February 2026 following US and Israeli strikes on Iran and subsequent attacks by Tehran on neighbouring countries, disrupted business activity and damaged key energy and civilian infrastructure across parts of the region.

Despite the geopolitical uncertainty, Petno said Gulf financial markets had demonstrated resilience. Debt capital markets remained largely open throughout the conflict, although equity capital market-related activity had slowed as investors adopted a more cautious stance.

JPMorgan has been steadily expanding its Middle East presence. After establishing its regional headquarters at Riyadh in 2025, the bank now plans to grow its operations in the UAE and double its regional workforce over the next three to five years.

The lender is also working closely with governments, sovereign wealth funds, and corporate clients to structure financing for reconstruction and long-term economic diversification projects.

As Gulf economies continue efforts to reduce dependence on hydrocarbons, JPMorgan believes the region will remain one of the world’s most active investment destinations, with demand for infrastructure and strategic capital expected to extend well beyond the immediate post-conflict recovery period.

The post JPMorgan commits USD 20 billion to Gulf, bets on post-war reconstruction boom appeared first on International Finance.

The appointments, effective immediately, were confirmed in a regulatory filing on Thursday (June 25). Petno and Rohrbaugh, who have jointly run the bank’s Commercial & Investment Bank (CIB) since early 2024, will now each lead a division outright. Petno becomes sole chief executive of the Commercial & Investment Bank, while Rohrbaugh takes over as chief executive of Consumer & Community Banking, succeeding Lake.

Alongside his promotion as co-president, Rohrbaugh was also appointed the top boss for JPMorgan’s Consumer and Community Banking unit. He began his career as an options trader on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange and joined the bank in 2005 as global head of foreign exchange derivatives.

He built his career in JPMorgan’s markets franchise, eventually overseeing its macro markets business, ⁠a key trading unit within the Wall Street giant whose activities span covering interest rates, currencies, commodities, and emerging markets, before leading the markets and securities services business.

Rohrbaugh’s experience propelled him to the bank’s co-chief of the Commercial & Investment Bank (CIB), alongside Petno. The unit raked in USD 78.5 billion in 2025, constituting over 40% of the bank’s overall revenue that year.

As per the analysts at Bank of America, Rohrbaugh is viewed as a leading candidate to take over Dimon’s role, with a caveat that it may not happen for several more years.

“Rohrbaugh’s appointment as head of the consumer banking unit could provide broader experience and hand him a slight edge over Petno in the succession race,” RBC Capital Markets analyst Gerard Cassidy told Reuters.

“The promotions of Petno and Rohrbaugh to co-presidents and sole CEOs of the company’s two largest businesses are part of the board’s ongoing succession planning process,” JPMorgan said in a statement.

Talking about Petno, a seasoned banker with over three decades at the Wall Street biggie, will continue to lead the CIB unit as the sole CEO. Prior to his promotion to CIB chief in January 2025, Petno was co-head of global banking, a unit that serves more than 65,000 ‌clients across ⁠46 countries.

Petno was the brain behind the successful integration of JPMorgan’s commercial, corporate, and investment banking businesses, apart from overseeing the expansion of the commercial banking business in the United States during his tenure as its CEO from 2012 to 2024.

He also spent more than two decades in investment banking and led JPMorgan’s “Global Natural Resources Group,” advising clients across industries from mining to real estate. Unlike other financial leaders on Wall Street, Petno has an unconventional academic background, holding a degree in biology alongside his ⁠MBA.

Petno has built a diverse career, working in energy investment banking, middle-market lending, and corporate banking. This has given the veteran banker broad experience across JPMorgan’s client-facing businesses.

Dimon added that the changes marked “an important step” in the board’s succession planning, praising the pair’s leadership abilities.

Lake, a former chief financial officer who has held senior roles across the bank for more than 25 years, is retiring with no departure date yet disclosed. She had been widely viewed as a frontrunner to succeed Dimon, having been named one of the most powerful women in business earlier in 2026.

The reshuffle follows the exit of Daniel Pinto, another former leadership contender, in 2025, which had already stirred uncertainty over the succession timeline. Jennifer Piepszak, the bank’s chief operating officer, and Mary Erdoes, the long-time CEO of JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management division, remain in their current roles but are no longer seen internally as likely successors to Dimon.

Dimon, who turned 70 this year, has led JPMorgan since 2006, steering it through the 2008 financial crisis and turning it into the world’s most valuable bank by market capitalization, now exceeding USD 890 billion. He has given no firm timeline for stepping down, though transition is expected to begin as early as 2026, with speculation persisting over whether he might remain chairman.

Petno and Rohrbaugh earned a combined USD 27.5 million in 2025, according to JPMorgan’s proxy statement, while Dimon received a USD 43 million pay package.

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“The lender is in talks with investors over a transaction that would allow ⁠it to transfer risk tied to ‘net asset value loans’ backed by private equity fund assets,” reported the Financial Times.

Under the Wall Street bank’s new strategy, it will initiate a risk transfer that would ⁠allow it to retain the NAV (Net Asset Value) loans on its balance sheet while shifting a portion of potential ‌losses to investors.

“The bank is looking to shift up to 12.5% of losses on the pool, with investors offered a low-teens return for taking the first-loss position. The terms remain fluid,” the Financial Times reported further.

JPMorgan’s NAV pool spans dozens of facilities lent to private equity funds across North America, Europe, and the Middle East, providing a broad cross-section of sponsor exposure rather than a concentrated bet on any single manager.

“Sponsors have leaned heavily on NAV financing to return capital to limited partners or to inject growth funding into portfolio companies while waiting for a more constructive disposal environment. Secondary buyers of fund stakes have also used the product to lever their returns. The result has been a sharp build-up of fund-level leverage layered on top of the debt already sitting at portfolio companies,” reported Private Equity Insights.

NAV loans are pitched as low risk on the basis that they are collateralised by diversified pools of fund assets. Borrowing on the NAV front gets generally capped at around a quarter of net asset value.

However, a prolonged slowdown in loan realisations, along with concerns over AI potentially disrupting the valuations of software-heavy portfolios, has put a question mark on the NAV loans’ “low risk” status itself.

Regulators in the United States and Europe have already flagged the “leverage over leverage” risk, while market participants are questioning whether NAV borrowings were getting used to prop up portfolio companies beyond a fund’s formal investment period, in order to “flatter reported performance”.

Apart from JPMorgan, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group is also pursuing a similar risk transfer tied to loans extended to listed private credit funds. These developments suggest that synthetic offload structures are becoming the new normal for banks when it comes to trimming sponsor-related exposures without exiting client relationships.

However, global asset-management firm AllianceBernstein doesn’t see the moves by JPMorgan and Mitsubishi UFJ affecting the NAV lending’s future, as the industry, which currently sits at roughly USD 100 billion, will likely touch the USD 350 billion mark by 2030.

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