One of the best-kept secrets in the financial center of Frankfurt is what the largest US bank, JP Morgan, has been looking for employees for for months at the location in Berlin, which has not even really opened yet.

According to information from the FAZ, fewer than a hundred people are currently working there, but their work is likely to become more intensive soon.

Because now it has apparently been decided that Germany will be the next and thus second market in Europe on which JP Morgan will open an online bank for private customers.

It should start in Berlin at the end of 2024 or beginning of 2025.

The spokeswoman for JP Morgan in Frankfurt declined to comment.

Hanno Mussler

Editor in Business.

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In Germany, JP Morgan has so far been active for corporate customers and in investment banking.

In the fourth quarter of 2021, it launched a new online bank for private customers in Europe called “Chase” in Great Britain.

Before further steps in other countries, it is said, one should first wait and see whether this will be a success.

Within a few months, UK Chase managed to attract 500,000 customers and around €10 billion in deposits.

The app was the most downloaded app in the UK in 2022, ahead of Revolut and Monzo.

Goldman and Citi give up

While competitor Goldman Sachs reduced its private customer business with the digital brand "Marcus" in October 2022 despite the cooperation with Apple and the other rival Citigroup closed its private customer business in 13 countries, including China, India, Australia and Poland, JP Morgan wants to expand into other European countries from Berlin countries grow.

The online bank apparently does not rely on very young people as customers, but on professionals.

She wants to make offers for deposits, loans and payment transactions to them.

This would make the largest US bank JP Morgan in Germany a serious competitor for Deutsche Bank and Postbank, ING and Commerzbank, even if it only operates as a digital bank without branches.

When asked whether JP Morgan's plans worried him, Commerzbank's private customer board member Thomas Schaufler replied in an interview with the FAZ in December: "I'm relaxed about it.

The German market is very fragmented, and you have to think carefully: Where do you attack?” Schaufler also raised concerns that “a lot of money would have to be spent on advertising” in order to “take such a brand, which is relatively unknown to private customers, in Germany establish".