Report: JPMorgan Global Head of Payments Georgakopoulos to Step Down

Takis Georgakopoulos, JPMorgan Chase’s global head of payments, is reportedly leaving the banking giant.

Georgakopoulos, who has headed that division since 2017, will step down to pursue other ventures, Reuters reported Monday (June 3), citing an internal memo.

According to the report, Max Neukirchen and Umar Farooq have been named as his successors, effective immediately.

Reuters noted that these appointments are the latest major leadership changes put in place by CEO contenders Jennifer Piepszak and Troy Rohrbaugh as they try to make their mark on JPMorgan’s newly-merged commercial and investment banking division.

Georgakopoulos had spent 17 years with JPMorgan  and is credited with expanding its payments business, which processes $10 trillion per day, the report added.

“During his tenure, the business has become one of the firm’s biggest growth engines, increasing revenue and market share in a highly competitive environment,” Piepszak and Rohrbaugh, co-heads of the commercial and investment bank, wrote in an in-house message to employees seen by Reuters.

PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster spoke last May with Georgakopoulos in a wide-ranging interview that covered — among other things — his company’s efforts to help businesses reach the same level of “intuitive commerce” as bigger eCommerce players.

While these businesses don’t have the capability, infrastructure or expertise to get there, he said, they also don’t need to “rewire” themselves.

“That’s why companies such as ours,” he said of J.P. Morgan Payments, “have stepped in, to help these companies to develop these capabilities more simply.”

He added that J.P. Morgan Payments has found a number of FinTech partners that have developed strong capabilities to help client firms (and, by extension, the bank’s client firms) manage know your customer (KYC), anti-money laundering and other back-end functions. The partnerships allow for software as a service and fraud defense as a service.

“If you do this well, and you do it at scale — and globally – this is what gives us the license to do everything else,” Georgakopoulos told Webster.

His departure comes as JPMorgan is preparing for the eventual retirement of longtime CEO Jamie Dimon.

“The board is focused on enabling an orderly CEO transition to take place in the medium-term,” the bank’s board said in a proxy statement in April. “As part of succession planning, the board continues to oversee management’s development of several operating committee members who are well-known to shareholders as strong potential candidates to succeed Mr. Dimon.”