On this special, bonus episode of Masters in Business, I speak with Filippo Gori, co-head of Global Banking at J.P. Morgan. Gori shares insights from his climb through the firm’s ranks across London and Hong Kong, plus discuss the current state of banking, capital markets and more.
A transcript of our conversation is available below.
You can stream and download our full conversation, including any podcast extras, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube (audio), and Bloomberg. All of our earlier podcasts on your favorite pod hosts can be found here.
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MASTERS IN BUSINESS
A Conversation with Filippo Gori Co-Head of Global Banking, JP Morgan
Bloomberg Radio • Transcript
ANNOUNCER (00:00:02): Bloomberg Audio Studios. Podcasts. Radio. News. This is Masters in Business with Barry Ritholtz on Bloomberg Radio.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:00:17): This week on the podcast — what a fascinating conversation. Filippo Gori is co-head of global banking at JP Morgan. He started in London and eventually moved over to Hong Kong, where he worked for 13 years before coming recently to New York. He’s seen just about every aspect there is when it comes to commercial, corporate and investment banking around the world. I thought this conversation was quite fascinating, and I think you will also. With no further ado, JP Morgan’s Filippo Gori.
FILIPPO GORI (00:00:51): Thank you for having me.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:00:52): I’m fascinated by the mispronunciation of your name — “Philip O’Gorey.” Did the people in Hong Kong really think you were Scottish or Irish?
FILIPPO GORI (00:01:03): At the beginning, when I just moved to Hong Kong, people were surprised when I arrived there, because the way they pronounce my name and surname, it sounds more like “Philip O’Gorey.” So they were expecting an Irish or a Scottish person — then they had an Italian, so they had to adjust to that.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:01:20): That’s very funny. So let’s roll back a little. Before Hong Kong, you get your master’s of science in economics, summa cum laude, from Bocconi University in Milan. Was markets and investment banking always the career plan?
FILIPPO GORI (00:01:37): No, absolutely not the plan — well, not that I really had any plans back then, but my passion was, and still is, history. I grew up in rural Tuscany, and I’m a byproduct of the Italian state education. You take your high school exam at the age of 19, and then you apply to university. So in the three months between finishing high school and deciding where you go to university, I thought I was going to go and study history in Florence. But my dad, who has been a central figure in my life, suggested to me, why don’t you apply to Bocconi University? I didn’t really have an idea what it was — I only knew it was in Milan — and maybe more to please him, I took the tests, and I went on with the rest of my summer holidays. And then I got accepted to Bocconi, and I decided to go there, but with no real plans back then.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:02:51): Well, you mentioned you were thinking about going into history. You taught classical civilization in the UK. Tell us, was an academic career ever in the cards?
FILIPPO GORI (00:03:05): Yeah. When I finished with Bocconi — I graduated in economic history — I thought I was going to do a PhD in that topic. Back then, there was a rule whereby you’re not allowed to move from a master’s directly to a PhD. You need to work for a couple of years, and then you apply for the PhD. And therefore it made sense to think, okay, you know what, I’m going to remain in academia as I start thinking about the dissertation that I will work on for my PhD. And therefore, for a variety of totally strange reasons, I ended up as a teacher in North Yorkshire, in an English college, teaching Italian as a foreign language and classical civilization too. And then, by pure chance, I stepped into the opportunity to apply to JP Morgan. And I applied to JP Morgan, and I’ve never left since then.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:04:11): That was London in 1999. So first — did you start in markets, or asset management, or banking?
FILIPPO GORI (00:04:22): That’s a very good question. I started in a graduate program back then. I joined JP Morgan pre-merger with Chase. It was a tiny — back then — global institution of around 15,000 people globally. Think about now: we have 330,000. We had lost the coveted AAA rating back in the middle of the nineties, and it was a bank that was trying to find its roots back. We were not one of the five broker-dealers that were the shining objects of the era; we were probably a tier-two, if not tier-three, institution back then. And I joined in a graduate program called Internal Consulting Services. The idea was they were hiring the most diverse people, with the most diverse of backgrounds, and somebody like me would work on a variety of different things, including the internet, which was something that was coming to be back then.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:05:26): 1999 — the internet was big back then.
FILIPPO GORI (00:05:28): So they hired me, and the idea was you would rotate in this graduate program every three months in a different part of the firm, so you learn how the firm operates and you can decide how you can help interject the internet into all of this. My first rotation was in asset management. My second rotation was in CRM — client relationship management, believe it or not. And then — back then, literally, the world was so small — suddenly they need an analyst in the Milan office to do FX sales. They look around and say, who is the last Italian who has joined us? And somebody says, there is this guy — I’ve seen him around. So they call me up and say, okay, do you know one plus one? That was the interview. Okay, you move to Milan to do FX sales. So that’s how I moved to markets, to do FX sales. And then the merger happened, they brought me back to London, I moved to derivatives, and I grew up on the markets side of the business.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:06:34): So London to Milan. And then what brought you to Hong Kong in 2013?
FILIPPO GORI (00:06:39): 2013 — that’s another interesting story. So we need to wind the clock back. It’s 2012. I’ve been running Southern Europe for quite some time with a friend who was my co-head back then, and the opportunity to move to New York started to develop. So I discussed with my wife, who back then was working at the Bank of England, whether she could be seconded to the Fed, and so on and so forth. So the conversation started happening as, okay, you know what, after 12 or 13 years at the firm in London, we’re going to move to New York.
And then suddenly, May 2012, the London Whale happened, and the decision was, forget about it — you stay put. Back then my wife said to me, please, I know that Asia is not on your cards, you want to move to New York, but if there is ever the opportunity to move to Asia, please promise me that you will consider it. And as every Italian man does — of course, darling, absolutely.
So roughly a year later, I get a call from my boss, who says, okay, Daniel Pinto — who was the CEO of the CIB back then — wants to see you tomorrow to discuss an opportunity to move to Hong Kong. Don’t sit on it thinking about it too much; they’re considering somebody external, so make up your mind pretty quickly. So, as you do in those circumstances as an Italian man, what I did was send a text to my wife. And the text was something along the lines of: darling, maybe tonight after dinner we should have a conversation, because there is an option to move to Asia — but it’s unlikely, I’m not so sure. She replied five minutes later: tell them that we are going. So the following morning, when I went to interview with the boss, it was kind of — that’s fine, whatever, we’re going.
So literally, I moved to Hong Kong having never been to Hong Kong in my life — and I had never been to Asia in my life. But the family was happy, so it was a family adventure, and we took it like that. Literally, the furthest east I had been was India; I had never been to Asia when I moved there.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:09:12): Why was your wife so enthusiastic about Hong Kong and Asia? Had she been before?
FILIPPO GORI (00:09:16): She had traveled around Asia already, definitely. She had been to Japan and other parts of the region.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:09:23): Japan and Hong Kong — very different.
FILIPPO GORI (00:09:25): Very different. And she said, it’s the right time — we were both late thirties, the girls were still young. Life is about the journey, and therefore it was the right thing to do. Interestingly enough, from a career standpoint, it was a totally non-traditional choice. And everyone was saying to me, you’re going to come back in a body bag. Or there was this acronym, FILTH — Failed In London, Try Hong Kong — because there was a little bit of an idea back then that if you were not good enough to operate in Europe, they used to ship you to Asia, back from the colonial days.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:10:12): I was going to say, that might have been true 50 years ago — but in the nineties and two thousands?
FILIPPO GORI (00:10:18): Well, still, there was that view. But we went there and we loved it. We absolutely loved Hong Kong, to the point that we spent 12 years there.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:10:28): Wow. So obviously there’s a bit of culture shock, but I’m really interested in what it was like being an Italian who worked in London, now going to an entirely different culture, a different way they do business. How challenging was that transition?
FILIPPO GORI (00:10:49): It was interesting in the sense that I thought I knew diversity, because back then I was running Southern Europe — Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal — where, although there are commonalities from a culture standpoint, there are different ways of doing business. And I know that for us, Italians and Spaniards are not the same thing. But largely, the reality is that we have a lot in common culturally. So you move to Hong Kong and you run a region of 16, 17 countries that is truly, truly diverse. And the best definition that I got of Asia was: it is a conglomerate of countries that happens to share the same time zone.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:11:36): But that’s it.
FILIPPO GORI (00:11:37): And even that definition is wrong, because if you think about Wellington in New Zealand and Mumbai, there’s seven and a half hours, right? So it’s wider than the US. So they have really nothing in common. So you spend a lot of time trying to understand how the business operates around you. And there is no way that you manage to do it unless you put in the experience, you put in the years. So after 12 years, I feel I am comfortable in understanding how Asia operates — but it took me truly, truly a long time.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:12:14): So I was going to ask — you say how Asia operates, but that’s 16 different countries, different regulations, different ways of doing business, different cultures, different languages.
FILIPPO GORI (00:12:26): Absolutely. So let me give you an example. You go to Japan — it’s not so important what is said in the meeting, but what is not said in the meeting, and the concept of face, and how things operate. You go to Australia, at the opposite end of the region, and it’s very much in your face — they tell you very clearly what they think of you, and so on and so forth. And then between these two extremes, you have every shape of things. So it takes time. But it’s fascinating, and I loved getting to know the culture, getting to know the history, getting to know, quote-unquote, the biases, getting to know the opportunities. And if you think about it — and this is probably not well known — most likely by the end of this decade, 50 percent of global GDP will be housed in Asia Pacific, and the second, third and fourth largest countries from a GDP standpoint will be Asian.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:13:31): China, Japan, Korea — is that it?
FILIPPO GORI (00:13:33): No — China, India, Japan, most likely.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:13:36): South Korea doesn’t make the top four?
FILIPPO GORI (00:13:38): South Korea doesn’t make the top four.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:13:40): Hmm, really, really interesting — to say nothing of Taiwan. And then obviously Vietnam and other countries are much smaller.
FILIPPO GORI (00:13:47): Yeah — or Australia, which is a continent in itself, with all the peculiarities. So it is a remarkable, interesting region that is not well understood, both from an opportunity standpoint and a challenges standpoint. And it’s interesting — in Chinese, the sign for opportunity and challenge is the same.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:14:12): Really, really interesting. Is English the universal language over there? Obviously Australia and New Zealand are going to be easy — two people separated by a common language is the old joke about America and the UK — but what was it like trying to communicate in places like Thailand, or Vietnam, or the Philippines, or Malaysia?
FILIPPO GORI (00:14:41): In Southeast Asia, English is more widely used, for historical reasons. Think about Singapore, Thailand and some of the others —
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:14:56): Colonialism, sure.
FILIPPO GORI (00:14:57): Yeah, sure — Malaysia and so on and so forth. In North Asia, it is not as widely used, and therefore you need to learn how to communicate through translations, or the whole ritual that there is at times related to the translation. And at times, especially on the mainland in China, even in meetings where your audience will speak English, the meeting will be held in Chinese with a translation. So there is a whole understanding of how you operate in those countries that is complicated.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:15:39): So you’ve said that the corporate outlook has remained very resilient despite what seems like an endless run of geopolitical uncertainty. We’ve had tariffs, we’ve had wars, we’ve had inflation. What are people in various regions doing to cope with this, and what underlines this ongoing resiliency?
FILIPPO GORI (00:16:04): The resilience is probably one of the most surprising factors of 2026. If you think about what has been put through the global economy in the last couple of years, the global economy has been exceptionally, exceptionally resilient. This is true of the world. Then, depending on where you are around the world, clients are focused — or regulators or governments are focused — on different topics.
If you start, for instance, with the US: clearly the economy is doing fantastically well, and there is a sense of, how can we continue to dream about outcomes that were not even possible a few years back, and how can we participate in this incredible engine of growth, this super-resilient economy? There are some concerns around inflation — every now and then you hear people talking about it — but generically, and this tells you a lot about the cultural attitudes of different places in the world, here there is a sense of optimism that is clearly palpable.
You move to Europe, and the environment is resilient. Europe is doing, to a certain extent, better than we at times give it credit for, but it is preparing for a heavy electoral cycle that will come next year. Italy will go to election — the parliament will come to an end next year — so will France, and the UK most likely will have a new prime minister after the summer. So there is already, as you go around Europe, a sense of, we are beginning the electoral cycle. There are concerns around inflation in Europe, spillover from the Iran crisis, and how that would prompt the ECB, which already has high rates, and how that would shape the European economy. There is a war on the eastern border, between Ukraine and Russia, that is impacting the rest of the region, and it’s shaping the way leaders and business leaders are thinking about the future. And there is, to a certain extent, a sense of admiration looking towards the US, and a sense of, is there more that can be done to make Europe like the US?
Then you go to the Middle East. Clearly the Middle East is still recovering from what’s going on, but that part of the world is for sure the winner in a global South narrative, for a variety of different reasons. It will remain a winner of the global South narrative. And notwithstanding the geopolitical headwinds, you can see the investments that are still going there — and they will keep on going there. There is an infrastructural shift in the way the Middle East thinks, and also in building infrastructure, that is fundamental.
Then you go to Africa, which is a supremely important continent for a variety of different reasons — probably the most extreme in terms of dealing with countries which we are not really used to. We have a large presence in South Africa and Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Kenya. And there you see the importance of critical minerals, the importance of urbanization, the demographics that are exceptionally in favor of that part of the world. So while for the past decade and this decade Asia has been a fundamental part of the global economic landscape, we need to start thinking that after the Middle East, Africa will become the next big thing.
And then you move to Asia. Asia, to a certain extent, is not up-and-coming — it has really arrived. I already mentioned the second, third and fourth largest economies in the world. And there, it will be a matter of dealing, to a certain extent, with the geopolitical winds — sometimes they blow in one direction, sometimes they blow in a different direction — and the strategic angle of that part of the world. There is a narrative out there that globalization is finished. I beg to disagree — a little exaggerated — because the economies are so intertwined. And if you see how much manufacturing happens in Asia, it is very difficult to reverse. It doesn’t mean that you should not try, but shifting supply chains takes years, if not decades. So that part of the world will remain fundamental. And there you have Japan, which is performing exceptionally well and is super, super interesting. You have China, which remains supremely interesting from an opportunity standpoint, and the way they’re changing their own economy. You mentioned Korea — think about the importance of Korea from a memory standpoint for the AI ecosystem. Then you have India, you have Southeast Asia, you have critical minerals in Australia. So different parts of the world are dealing with the current setup in different ways. And you have probably the two extremes, if I think about it, with Europe in the middle: the US and Asia really gunning for growth, while Europe is still trying to figure out a way to grow more in this current environment.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:22:03): So we’re going to talk a whole lot more about Asia in a bit, but I want to circle back to the Middle East and to Africa. I think a lot of us think of the Middle East as just a collection of petro-states, with Israel in the middle, and then whatever geopolitical turmoil surrounds that structure. It sounds like you are looking at the Middle East as not only a changing set of infrastructure, but becoming a financial center. What else is happening in the Middle East? That’s a huge change.
FILIPPO GORI (00:22:41): You mentioned part of it already. So it is becoming a more relevant financial center — for sure, the UAE is becoming much more important from that standpoint, and you can perceive, when you go there, the degree of investment that is taking place from global players positioning themselves over there. Then there is the whole set of investments and reforms to the economy of the Kingdom, and how that is shaping the changes of Saudi into the future — and again, it is remarkable, the changes that you see happening day to day over there. Then you have Qatar. And there is an enormous infrastructure play taking place in that part of the world — typical solid infrastructure, but there is also digital infrastructure taking place over there. Think about energy, and how fundamental energy is for data centers. That part of the world becomes super fundamental from that point of view too.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:23:55): We used to think of finance centers as New York, London, Hong Kong. Do we add Dubai to it? Is Dubai in that group?
FILIPPO GORI (00:24:05): I think you need to add Dubai, and for sure Singapore too — you cannot forget Singapore. And to a certain extent, I think Tokyo is still a fundamental player, especially in the equity markets globally. Those are the ones that in my mind I would consider fundamental. And then, if you allow me, there is also continental Europe — there are a few centers there.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:24:32): So we’re going to circle back to Europe also. But one last question about this area — I have to ask about Africa. We all know about rare earths and other minerals. Africa stands out as one of the few regions that isn’t going through the same sort of fertility crisis that we’re seeing in the rest of the world. Is that a driver, or is it something more fundamental than that?
FILIPPO GORI (00:24:57): I think you have what you said — demographics and urbanization are super fundamental. Then you have the richness in critical minerals. And I would add that Africa, to a certain extent, has probably been — not ignored, but not on the radar screen of the Western world for too long. To the point that the influence in Africa is heavy from Russia and China. So I think it’s in our interest to make sure that the Western world understands Africa and operates over there, for a variety of different reasons. Africa is the southern border of the European Union, and it is fundamental, and it is not well understood. For instance, at times Russia does not only create problems for Europe from an eastern border standpoint; it creates problems for Europe from a southern border standpoint, by operating in some of the sub-Saharan African countries and pushing immigrants towards the shores of Europe.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:26:08): Which has been a problem in Europe — it led to Brexit. It’s a problem here in the United States — or I should say it’s an issue, not so much a problem.
FILIPPO GORI (00:26:18): Starting from the assumption, though, that Europe has a demographic issue, and therefore we need to figure out a way to —
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:26:31): Increase population, or —
FILIPPO GORI (00:26:32): — or accept that Europe needs a certain degree of immigration. How to do that is not well understood.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:26:42): It seems to be a function of wealth — that when a country hits a certain per capita income, people have options, and they tend to have fewer children. Is anything going to change that, or is that just the way it is?
FILIPPO GORI (00:26:57): I think there are some components of it — I don’t think it’s only wealth; it’s also cultural. If I look at Italy, which is a wealthy country in itself, although relatively small — if you think about it, fewer than 60 million people live in Italy — Italy has been in a demographic crisis now for 40 years. And at the current pace, there will be no more Italians in just over a century. And Italy is also losing a lot of talent — every year, between 100,000 and 115,000 young Italians leave the country to go and work somewhere else. So there is a lot of it that is cultural too.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:27:47): Hmm, really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Filippo Gori, co-head of global banking at JP Morgan, talking about the growth of JP Morgan into a powerhouse. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:28:18): I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Filippo Gori. He’s co-head of global banking at JP Morgan. Having joined the firm in London in 1999, he has since relocated through Hong Kong to New York. So you’ve had really such a unique perspective — you’ve led businesses in Asia Pacific, in emerging markets, in London, and now in New York. Do you have to adapt your leadership style or your strategy when you move from one region to another?
FILIPPO GORI (00:28:57): Absolutely. It is part of the exercise of growing into the job. One of the things I learned early on in my career: you cannot have the same leadership style with every colleague. That was particularly true in Asia, where if you use the same tone of approach with a Japanese colleague and an Australian colleague, for sure you get it wrong in one of the two cases. So you need to adjust how you react to your colleagues and your clients, and you adjust your communication, your delivery, how you deliver the importance of certain things, and so on and so forth. I’m still trying to figure out the US — full disclaimer.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:29:42): Well, I’m curious — I’m going to assume New York is more like Australia than Japan. But I would also imagine a lot of differences from London.
FILIPPO GORI (00:29:52): Absolutely. London is very much understated, and there is a way in which you say something, but without really saying it outright.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:30:04): And New York is pretty much the opposite, huh? No mincing words.
FILIPPO GORI (00:30:09): So it’s been interesting so far.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:30:11): I can imagine. So your charge is global banking. And when I think of that department, that’s everything from investment banking to corporate services to commercial banking. How do you get all those lines of business to collaborate, as opposed to compete? It seems like all the horses are pulling in different directions.
FILIPPO GORI (00:30:36): It is actually the other way around. Global banking is three lines of business — commercial banking, corporate banking and investment banking — that have been put together under this global banking umbrella that spans 46 countries, around 200 major locations around the world, and, let’s call it, around 70,000 clients, give or take. And the idea is you cover all the wholesale banking businesses under one umbrella. So, every corporate that makes at least $20 million of revenues and above — less than $20 million is called business banking, and it belongs to Chase, so you’re still using the branches. The moment you qualify, let’s say from a revenue standpoint or a size-of-business standpoint, for the wholesale part of the firm, you become part of JP Morgan. Then the whole client continuum is covered by the same management team, the same group of leaders, with the same rules, the same capital allocation, and so on and so forth.
It is becoming particularly important, especially in this day and age — think about the innovation economy, whereby a corporate or a startup graduates to become a multi-billion-dollar corporation supremely fast nowadays. In the past, it could take 20 years, 30 years for a corporate to grow through the various stages of life. Here it’s from cradle to infinity at the speed of light. So it is important that the transition and the support happen within a homogeneous management, and the same way of looking at the clients.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:32:29): So JP Morgan emphasizes technology investment and the importance of artificial intelligence. What parts of banking is AI changing? What is very much ahead of the curve, and what do you think are the areas that are most ripe for disruption?
FILIPPO GORI (00:32:48): It is very difficult to assess whether you are ahead of the curve, or ahead of the pack, or whether you’re just doing what everyone else is doing, because things are changing so rapidly. So I would not dare to say, oh, we are ahead of the curve. We are investing — it is a giant leap of mankind, in terms of the revolution that is happening under our eyes. There is clearly efficiency that can be achieved through the use of AI processes and procedures and tools, so that you can provide better client service, or better customer service, while being more efficient — which means that you can probably cover more clients. And our ambition is to cover more clients — let’s say to reach a hundred thousand clients by 2030 — in a more efficient way. So technology and, quote-unquote, AI are helping us scale the business much faster than before, and ideally without having to increase the costs.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:33:55): Hmm, really, really interesting. I think we’re all aware that AI is changing everything so rapidly. Where do you think human judgment is irreplaceable? What part of the business is, hey, we could become more efficient with AI, but the ultimate decision-maker has to be a person?
FILIPPO GORI (00:34:17): It’s fundamental that a human is in the loop, for a variety of different reasons. Ultimately, I would simplify it this way: you are dealing with clients, clients are human beings, and at the end of the day, I think a client wants to be dealt with by a person. So the human in the loop remains fundamental. AI can help speed up some processes, it can help achieve better scale, but the individual remains fundamental in our business.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:34:54): So when you joined JP Morgan back in 1999, you mentioned it was not at the top of the league tables. What was the reason it managed to break into the top tier? Was it this emphasis on technology investment? Was it a strategy? What led the firm to becoming a global top-tier bank?
FILIPPO GORI (00:35:20): Okay, so I think there is an obvious answer, and then there is a less obvious one. I would say the obvious answer is JP Morgan Chase went through a series of mergers, including acquiring Bank One in 2004, which brought to the firm a certain Jamie Dimon, who changed the way in which the firm operated. Think back then — the JP Morgan Chase–Bank One merger was still a conglomerate of institutions that had merged together over the previous 20 years, and many of those mergers had not actually been fully executed. You had Manufacturers Hanover merging into Chemical, merging into Chase. You had First Chicago merging into Bank One. You had JP Morgan and a variety of different things — there was Cazenove in the middle too. So the integration of all of this was a fundamental piece that made us who we are today. And Jamie was the leader, and the individual that could have the vision of how to do this and create the fortress balance sheet and everything else that came with that, that made us who we are today.
I think the less obvious answer is we went through 2007 — and I hope I’m not being controversial here, but probably we were still busy with the merger and everything else, so we didn’t have time to focus on some of the other stuff that then caused the problems. And Jamie’s view was very clear: we do things that make sense for the customers, we do things that make sense for the firm, fortress balance sheet, and so on and so forth.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:37:17): If I recall correctly — I want to say it was around ’05 — there was a minor little subprime issue with JP Morgan, long before it was a problem everywhere else. And if I remember correctly, Dimon said, get all that crap off our balance sheet; we don’t play in those sorts of speculative waters. So when the real trouble hit in ’08–’09, they had a very clean balance sheet. So that’s a factor.
FILIPPO GORI (00:37:49): And then, since then: investing, investing, investing, and investing again — through the cycle. You invest, you keep growing — you’re growing not because you like it per se, but because you can provide better customer service, you work towards the betterment of the communities where you operate, and you keep investing, absolutely, through the cycle. When I arrived in Asia in 2013, the firmwide revenues that we made in that year are less than what we made in the first quarter of this year. What has happened there has definitely been the growth of Asia in the meantime, but it has also been us investing in the region across products, countries and jurisdictions — so that if you build the infrastructure, and you are there to serve the clients, the business will come.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:38:44): Hmm, interesting. What does “one firm” mean in practice — this big motion towards JP Morgan as one firm? Whether you’re in the middle market, or a global enterprise, or the public markets — explain the thinking behind this.
FILIPPO GORI (00:39:02): So the thinking is: the organization is huge — it’s 330,000 people. So the idea is to make the company feel small to our clients, and to a certain extent to our employees.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:39:17): In other words, you don’t want scale to be a disadvantage.
FILIPPO GORI (00:39:20): Absolutely. Because when you have 330,000 people, maybe the adjective that you associate with us is not “nimble” — but we try to be. We make the firm feel small to our clients, to our employees, to the communities and everything else. So we try to maintain a personal, human angle in everything that we do.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:39:43): And you’ve now been at JP Morgan 26, almost 27 years — kind of unusual these days, people staying with one firm.
FILIPPO GORI (00:39:51): I’m one of the new kids on the block at the firm. There are people that have been there really — yeah, absolutely. Doug Petno, I think, is going on 37, and many of the other seniors — my co-head, John Simmons, I think is just crossing 34. And many of the other folks around me are in the same zip code, if not having spent more time than me.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:40:14): So what keeps you and these folks at the firm for so long?
FILIPPO GORI (00:40:19): I think the people and the culture. For me, JP Morgan became part of me and my family. And you stay because you like the people, you like the environment, you like what you do on your day-to-day — but fundamentally, I think, the people.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:40:37): And you mentioned 330,000 people. How big can JP Morgan Chase get? Is this going to be a half-a-million-person employer sometime soon?
FILIPPO GORI (00:40:49): I think from a scale standpoint, we are where we need to be in terms of people. The idea is, can we use AI to grow the business without having to grow the footprint much more?
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:41:02): So this is probably it for the next decade.
FILIPPO GORI (00:41:05): I would — I mean, I’m not Jamie, so you should ask the question to Jamie. But from a global banking standpoint, yes — I think the headcount we have now, we are trying to keep stable for the next few years.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:41:17): Huh, really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Filippo Gori, co-head of global banking at JP Morgan, discussing the state of capital markets today. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:41:52): I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’re listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest today is Filippo Gori. He’s co-head of global banking at JP Morgan, where he’s been working since 1999 — in London, Hong Kong, and now New York. So we touched on this earlier, about resiliency in the face of all this macro volatility. But it’s not just the economy — it’s been a ton of M&A and dealmaking, and this year we’ve seen a lot of IPOs, and giant IPOs at that. Why is all this holding up so well despite all of the geopolitical turmoil we see?
FILIPPO GORI (00:42:35): I think there is a variety of different things. To a certain extent, there was a little bit of pipeline that had been built over the years that needed to find its way —
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:42:46): It had slowed down post-pandemic for a while.
FILIPPO GORI (00:42:48): Exactly. So IPOs — we thought in 2024 they were going to come back; then in 2025, finally, we see the return of the IPOs, which is good as a component of cyclicality — it’s the right time for this to happen. M&A — I think there is probably an extent of what we discussed earlier on. Boards are observing the resiliency of the economy, of the global economy. They think it’s the right time to make strategic decisions. They’re probably getting comfortable that the cost of capital will not go much lower than where it is now — probably there’s a sense of higher-for-longer, to a certain extent. And therefore people are getting their hands dirty in terms of dealing. And we are just witnessing what could be, from a wallet standpoint in pure investment banking, if not the best-ever year — which was 2021 — very close to the best-ever year in terms of volumes.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:43:56): Probably the biggest change over the past decade has been the rise of private capital — whether it’s private debt, private credit, private equity. How is that changing a global bank? Do you guys look at this as competition, or is it expanding the range of solutions you can offer to clients?
FILIPPO GORI (00:44:15): It’s a little bit of both. Private capital definitely plays a role in the everyday economy, in the sense that after the GFC, for traditional banks, certain sectors in certain cases became harder to deploy capital to. And therefore, to a certain extent, there is a group of clients that arrived to be the beneficiaries of private credit — because of the simplicity of the solution, the unitranche, and so on and so forth. So that has caused the growth of that sector. And we have been operating — we have been doing loans, and a private loan is just another form of loan — for 225 years. So we launched our own initiative, our own private credit business, a few years back, but we increased it last year — officially around February last year — to $50 billion of our own capital allocated to it. And the idea is, when you go to a client, you try to offer an agnostic set of solutions: we can do anything you want, from the traditional private lending solutions, to more innovative solutions, to the traditional syndicated financing facilities, and so on and so forth. So the idea is to offer the clients all the potential tools in the JP Morgan armory.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:45:51): So these private transactions have been rising really since after the financial crisis. What does this tell us about public market M&A? How do you look at the difference between these few public companies and this rising number of private companies?
FILIPPO GORI (00:46:14): Look, it’s a trend that has been going on since the 1980s. The number of public companies in the US, and around the world, has reduced substantially since then. There are various reasons for that. Part of it could be the cost associated with being a public company. Part of it could be the fact that some of the companies have grown in size and have acquired some of the smaller companies, and so on and so forth. I am absolutely in favor of a healthy public market, because it’s one of the greatest strengths of the United States — the fact that there is a market out there where you can raise capital, you can finance yourself, there is a price discovery mechanism, which I enormously love. If I look at other countries where I’ve operated, where the size of those public markets is smaller, you see that those economies struggle to gain scale, struggle to gain opportunity. So for me, the public market in the US is a treasure that must be cherished.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:47:25): Fair enough. We’ve seen a number of mega-deals happen over the past couple of quarters, including the giant SpaceX IPO. We have Anthropic coming up; there are a bunch of other AI IPOs coming up. But there’s also been a lot of merger activity in that space. What’s driving these big transformative deals?
FILIPPO GORI (00:47:51): As I mentioned, to a certain extent it is the perception of stability of the cost of financing, the opportunity from regulation that will make some transactions possible, and, I think, the backlog that had been created over the years. But in general, boards are very sanguine that this is the right moment — let’s take the opportunity, let’s transform. Many boards are also looking at what’s happening with AI and thinking, okay, it’s a Copernican revolution that is happening, therefore I’d better be ahead of it and take the opportunity, and so on and so forth.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:48:37): Otherwise you’re behind. So your charge is global — you get to look around the world at opportunities. I’m curious, how do you measure where opportunities are greatest? Are there specific data points you’re looking at, like volume of IPOs or mergers? How do you look at the world region by region and figure out, hey, we need to spend more time and capital in region X?
FILIPPO GORI (00:49:06): So what we do — this is a constant process whereby we challenge ourselves consistently as the CIB, the commercial and investment bank, management team. And we say, okay, we operate in 46 countries — should we operate in five more? And if so, which ones do we look at? What is the opportunity? Why does it strategically make sense to invest more in that country versus another? Or why don’t we invest more in an existing country? And so on and so forth. Bearing in mind that one of the fundamental ways in which we look at the world is the following: we have never left a single country since we entered it. So being in a country is not the same thing as owning a share or a stock — you don’t like it anymore, you sell it. Once you make the decision to enter a country, you are there forever, because you’re there for the employees, for the clients, for the communities, the regulators, and so on and so forth. So we think about that very carefully.
We look at some macro trends, we try to understand where the world is going, where the opportunities are coming. We ask our clients — some of our clients are some of the largest companies in the world — and you try to see how they think, how they operate: can we support them everywhere around the world where they operate, or not? Or similarly, there are companies that are developing in some of these countries and want to go global — can we support them in that case? So that’s the exercise that we do, and we look at it collectively as a CIB management team across the various products — whether it’s banking, whether it’s payments, whether it’s markets, whether it’s security services — and we collectively make a decision on where to invest. And we do it on a quasi-regular basis; we discuss this.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:50:57): So I want to talk about the EU and Asia, but before we dive into those areas — any other areas of the world that are presenting a great number of opportunities?
FILIPPO GORI (00:51:10): Well, Latin America, for sure. We have not discussed it, but if you think about Brazil and Mexico — for sure, super interesting markets, super important for us. And they are at the doorstep of the United States. So it is fundamental that we have a critical presence over there, and that we keep on growing it.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:51:33): And you mentioned earlier you think the European area is almost overlooked — that they’re on the verge of the next phase of growth. What’s going on in Europe?
FILIPPO GORI (00:51:46): So what I meant is, there is generically a degree of pessimism around Europe. The pessimism comes from the fact that the growth of the European Union, in terms of GDP growth, has been anemic for now — call it 25 years. It grows 0.5, 0.7, maybe 1 percent, and we consider ourselves lucky. And that has been one of the challenges, because growth brings jobs, growth brings wealth, growth brings all the things that I see here in the United States. At the same time, as a European, I always want to remind folks that Europe at times is not widely understood. The European Union concept was not born out of the idea of an economic union. It was born out of the dream of the founding fathers of the European Union not to have war on European soil ever again.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:52:49): From a security perspective, not an economic perspective.
FILIPPO GORI (00:52:51): They were visionaries, actually. If you think about De Gasperi in Italy, and Adenauer in Germany, and some of the others — the Second World War had just finished, the coal and steel treaties of the beginning of the 1950s. The idea was, if we are intertwined from an economic standpoint, it is less likely we will go to war together.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:53:17): It’s mostly worked.
FILIPPO GORI (00:53:18): And this worked. And the next thing was the Treaty of Rome, and that was the beginning of the European Union as we know it, and Maastricht and everything else. So I just want to remind people that Europe does exist — the European Union exists first and foremost not to have war on European soil. And we need to grow, don’t get me wrong — less bureaucracy, more growth — but we should not lose sight of what the founding fathers gave us.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:53:45): So let’s talk about the perspective from the United States about Europe: a lovely place to visit, but a challenging place to do business. A great place to live — because in much of Europe there’s guaranteed healthcare, guaranteed paid education, paid retirement — but it makes it expensive to do business there. It’s very hard to fire anybody. Is that American bias accurate, or no?
FILIPPO GORI (00:54:21): The criticism that is laid at the steps of the European Union is perfectly valid — all of the things you just mentioned, and more; the list is forever long. What I’m trying to say, though, is something different. This year we’re celebrating 250 years of the United States of America. Europe has over 3,000 years of history. So you can’t expect that 3,000 years of history get wiped out and they all row in the same direction. We have come from having had war every 10 years to not having had war since 1945. We have strengthened that. We have culturally enormous social nets. And my concern is, if the economies don’t grow, and we have a problem of demography, then in the future we will not be able to afford those social nets. So things have to happen in Europe — and I’m perfectly fine with that. Former President Draghi, in his white paper, told us what we have to do. We don’t need to reinvent the world; we just need to go and implement what he told us. Will we do it? Yes. Will it take us a long time? Absolutely, yes — because it’s Europe. But Europe exists for a variety of different reasons, and we should never forget that.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:55:55): Really, really interesting. So we’ve talked about regions; let’s talk about sectors. AI and technology, obviously a big sector. Manufacturing and industrial reshoring is going on. Infrastructure changes, financial services, energy and renewable energy, healthcare, defense — so many different areas seem to be going through massive transitions. What do you do with a target-rich environment like that? How do you decide where to focus? Or do the companies reveal themselves, and it becomes self-evident?
FILIPPO GORI (00:56:37): So we have an account planning process — year by year, sector by sector, region by region — where we look at the various sectors. And while you mentioned all of them in one go, not every sector is hot at the same time. So the focus is, within all the sectors in every country, and by subsector — we have 28 subsectors — do we have enough bankers? Do we have enough resources allocated? Can we do more? Should we do more? If we have to prioritize, how do we prioritize those asks? And that’s what we do. So there is an enormous amount of account planning — which, if you do it well, then the results will come.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:57:25): And you know, the Draghi white paper sort of veers into government-driven industrial policy. Obviously that’s big in China; it was big in the United States up until about 40 years ago. It seems like it’s coming back. How do you think about government involvement in these private-company decisions and growth?
FILIPPO GORI (00:57:50): So Europe already has a larger component of the economy that is state-owned or partially state-owned companies. So from a European standpoint, in itself, it is not so rare to have concepts like that. The idea, to me, is more: can we have pan-European champions? We have done that in the automotive sector; we have done that in the airline industry. We have not really done that in other sectors. Europe has freedom of movement for people, for capital — but there is no real freedom of movement for services yet. So that’s one of the things that we should try to implement, and therefore facilitate the growth of European champions in the various sectors, some of which you mentioned, so that we will be able to compete better with the US on one side, or with Asia on the other side. Europe still has a little bit of a bias that small is good, because small protects the consumer, from an economic standpoint — thinking about oligopolies and everything else. I think we’re at a stage where right now size matters, and therefore we should facilitate the creation of larger European companies — pan-European, not country-specific.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (00:59:38): Like Airbus — that’s the model.
FILIPPO GORI (00:59:41): Airbus could be one. There are plenty of other examples — in consumer there are a few; in cars, Stellantis is an example. We should do that in financial services, for instance. I think it’s fundamental that Europe has larger financial services players, and so on and so forth.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:00:06): What’s fascinating to me about Europe — and I appreciate what you’re saying about smaller companies needing to get big — in the US, where we used to enforce antitrust rules but kind of stopped in the 1980s, not only have these companies gotten big, but they’ve become mega-companies that dominate their space. To be clear, that’s very unlikely to happen in Europe, right? You want them large and global and competitive, but not necessarily dominant — at least if I’m going by what you’re describing.
FILIPPO GORI (01:00:38): Yes — that would be a step too far from a European Union standpoint, given the fundamental way in which Europeans look at business. But larger companies, absolutely.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:00:50): Right. I was curious, because they seem to be very — I don’t want to say hostile, but very specific — about regulating the Facebooks and Apples and Googles of the world, versus smaller companies that are trying to get a toehold in the global marketplace. All right, so before I get to my favorite questions, one last question. What do you think most people in investment banking, and/or commercial or corporate banking, aren’t thinking about, but really should be? What’s the important topic that’s not getting enough focus?
FILIPPO GORI (01:01:32): That’s a good question. I think there is a ton of focus on AI, geopolitics, inflation and other things. And I think we don’t spend enough time focusing on the people, and how we prepare the people for the future that is coming.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:01:55): So is that education? Is that corporate training?
FILIPPO GORI (01:01:58): It’s a little bit of everything. How do we explain to folks how we see the future? We should do more from that point of view, and prepare them for a future that is coming. But that starts with academia, and how we recruit people, and so on and so forth.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:02:17): So let’s jump to our favorite questions that we ask all of our guests — starting with, tell us about your early mentors who helped shape your career.
FILIPPO GORI (01:02:26): Man, I’ve been lucky to have had many people looking after me over the years. I’ve been lucky to have worked for the same individual for 19 years — I joined as his analyst, he was the associate on the desk, and 19 years later we were two senior managing directors, but I was still working for him. But there are three that I would like to mention. One is Matteo Del Fante. When I joined in London, he was the most senior Italian at the firm, and he is now the CEO of Poste Italiane — as a friend, as somebody who has looked after me and helped me, guided me. He’s from Tuscany too. And then probably Marc Badrichani, who retired in 2024, and he was running the markets business. And Carlos Hernandez, who was running banking before me. And I still remember, when I was in Hong Kong during COVID, he used to call me twice a week, religiously, every week, without booking a meeting — just call and say, how is everything going? All good? Tell me what’s happening. So the human element was really, really, really important for me.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:03:39): Let’s talk about books. What are some of your favorites, and what are you reading currently?
FILIPPO GORI (01:03:43): So I’m an avid reader — I read lots of stuff, nothing finance-driven. Right now I’m reading three Italian books at the same time, which is a little bit complicated. I like novels, I like fiction. But the one book that I read quite recently that impressed me was a book called The Wealth of Shadows.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:04:14): The Wealth of Shadows.
FILIPPO GORI (01:04:15): By Graham Moore. And it explains, in a fictionalized way, how the US during the Second World War used its economy to cripple the German economy. And you have individuals like Keynes playing into this, and how ultimately this became Bretton Woods, and the role of how the dollar overtook the pound, and so on and so forth. That was fascinating. And I read another book called A Girl Called Samson, which is about the Revolutionary War here in the United States, and a woman — it’s a real history — a woman that fought in the Continental Army under Washington, dressed as a boy.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:05:07): Oh really? Very, very interesting.
FILIPPO GORI (01:05:09): Those are two. But I also use Audible a lot. So audiobooks have lately been my saving grace, because I can listen to them while I’m traveling on planes, so I don’t need to carry the physical books with me. I’m a heavy user of Audible.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:05:31): Besides Audible, what else are you streaming? What are you either watching or listening to?
FILIPPO GORI (01:05:37): Watching — apart from your program, obviously — my wife and I loved Outlander, which just streamed its last season, on Starz I think it is, here in the US. And then Drops of God, about wine — it’s a fascinating series — and a few others.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:06:02): Huh, really, really interesting. We watched Outlander until the previous season, and kind of said, all right, we’re good right here — when they were stuck in the United States. But it was a really fascinating show. Final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college graduate interested in a career in either corporate, commercial or investment banking?
FILIPPO GORI (01:06:28): It’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon. So take your time; understand the environment in which you operate. Try to focus on the bigger, important things — don’t be too focused just on the product, but understand the environment in which you operate. Remember, it’s a people business, both internally and externally. So make sure that you invest in creating human relationships.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:06:53): And our final question: what do you know about the world of investing and investment banking today that might have been useful back in 1999, when you were first getting started?
FILIPPO GORI (01:07:05): It’s a marathon, not a sprint. So never take things for granted. And above all, don’t make personal sacrifices that you’re going to regret later. At times, I’ve not been as present as I would have liked with my family.
BARRY RITHOLTZ (01:07:28): Hmm, interesting enough. Filippo, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Filippo Gori. He is co-head of global banking at JP Morgan. If you enjoyed this conversation, well, check out any of the 650 we’ve done over the past 12 years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, Bloomberg, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I didn’t thank the crack team that helps us put these conversations together each week: Alexis Noriega is my video producer; Sean Russo is my researcher; Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I’m Barry Ritholtz. You’ve been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.
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