Chase to open 40 new Philly-area branches as part of national push, as other banks shutter

JPMorgan Chase & Co. said Tuesday that it plans to open another 40 Chase bank branches in the Philadelphia area by 2027, expanding from the 50 locations it has placed in the region since 2018.

In pushing physical locations, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon is defying the larger trend in the banking industry. As more consumers began banking online and through smartphone apps, the number of U.S. bank branches fell to under 70,000 last year from 80,000 in 2015, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data.

Indeed, since pushing into Philadelphia and other markets in the late 2010s, JPMorgan has passed Wells Fargo and Bank of America and now runs the largest U.S. bank network, with around 5,000 branches.

Dimon and other JPMorgan officials have said they can still make small, well-located branches profitable by using them to entice customers who use its national credit card, mortgage, student loans, and small-business loans to do more banking with Chase. Branches opening since 2017 have been bringing in an average $15 million in new deposits a year.

The company also said it plans to hire around 300 workers to staff the new Chase branches around Philadelphia, starting at more than $20 an hour, plus benefits.

» READ MORE: Bank branches are still hiring tellers and bankers, but the jobs look different now

Reversing its own recent trend toward cutting branches, Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan this winter announced plans to add branches in places that form gaps between its existing markets, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Philadelphia is one of several markets JPMorgan Chase has targeted for new branches over the next three years. Others include New York, Washington, Minneapolis, and Charlotte, N.C., spokesperson Jimmy Contreras said. In all, the bank plans several hundred new branches.

The company says each branch will cost $2.5 million to $3 million. “Our goal is to have 30% of our branches in [low- and moderate-income] communities,” Contreras said in a statement.

The bank’s current locations include five in Center City, along with multiple neighborhood branches in South, West, and North Philadelphia, and outposts in Fishtown, Germantown, Roxborough, and other city neighborhoods; suburban and South Jersey and Delaware sites; and stand-alone ATMs.

The company employs around 250,000 people worldwide, including 10,000 in the Philadelphia area, mostly at its data and technology center in Fairfax, Del., and its credit card center and other branches in and around nearby Wilmington and Newark, Del.

The Philadelphia region lost the major banks that once financed its industrial enterprises as executives sold them to larger out-of-town companies in the 1980s and 1990s; neighborhood banks have vanished as well.

» READ MORE: How Philly lost its big banks, and a little survivor that’s grown in the vacuum

Customers of the largest bank still based in the region, Wilmington-based WSFS, hold about 5% of the region’s more than $300 billion in local bank deposits, according to FDIC data. The dominant banks in the region — Wells Fargo; Bank of America; PNC, of Pittsburgh; and Canadian-owned TD Bank, which has its U.S. headquarters in Marlton — each have over 100 branches and at least $30 billion in local deposits.

TD, one of the banks that has consolidated some of its less-used suburban locations to cut costs, said in a recent statement that it may open a handful of urban branches in Philadelphia after further study of the market.

TD in 2008 acquired the former Commerce Bancorp, whose founder, Vernon Hill, pioneered a wave of fast-serve banking among competitors as he built a network of more than 600 branches in the metro Philadelphia, New York, and Washington areas. Hill’s attempt to build a more recent branch empire at Philadelphia-based First Republic Bank ended in 2022 when he was forced out by directors worried the company had not been winning enough new business to cover the cost of branch expansion.