This article originally appeared on Business Insider.
A longtime JPMorgan executive who has kept a low public profile while cultivating a reputation as a successful trader with a knack for risk management is emerging as a contender to succeed Jamie Dimon as chief executive.
Dimon, Wall Street’s longest-serving CEO, has not disclosed retirement plans, even as the financial industry has speculated about his succession planning and the people most likely to replace him for more than a decade.
Troy Rohrbaugh was named co-CEO of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank, known as CIB, as part of an internal executive reshuffle announced by JPMorgan last week. CIB is a sprawling group that includes global investment banks, commercial banks and other core businesses. Rohrbaugh will run CIB alongside Jennifer Piepszak, a longtime executive who industry insiders have considered for years as a possible successor to Dimon.
Wall Street is already familiar with Piepszak, who most recently served as co-chief executive of consumer and community banking and served as the company’s chief financial officer from 2019 to 2021. Analysts and investors are also very familiar with Marianne Lake, another key executive at longtime veteran who was elevated in the reorganization announced last week and is more frequently rumored to take over for Dimon when he eventually retires.
Rohrbaugh, 53, is less well-known on Wall Street than these colleagues. His new position through the internal reshuffle has brought him more publicly and prominently into the most watched succession race on Wall Street.
Now, the industry will watch as Rohrbaugh leads the CIB as JPMorgan performs above analysts’ expectations even in a troubled deal market. Business Insider followed Rohrbaugh’s journey from his college days to his most recent role as co-head of markets and financial services.
One industry recruiter noted that Rohrbaugh’s background as a risk manager could make him a powerful contender at the top of the corporate ladder.
Indeed, Dimon is known to brag about JPMorgan’s “fortress balance sheet”—that is, its ability to protect itself from financial shocks while giving its employees the flexibility to test money-making ideas. “They take prolific risks and manage them well,” this person said.
“Fortune began to change”
Rohrbaugh arrived at JPMorgan in 2005, the year JPMorgan announced it would name Dimon, who had been president and chief operating officer, as CEO. Rohrbaugh joined the firm from Goldman Sachs, where he ran the North American foreign exchange options business.
His first job at JPMorgan was as global head of forex derivatives. After years of problems in JPMorgan’s forex business, “the bank’s fortunes began to change” after Rohrbaugh joined in 2005, Euromoney wrote in 2017. He had been a “source of stability not only for JPMorgan but also for the the entire FX industry during its most important phase.” turbulent years”, writes the publication. The bank was then the first to introduce the possibility of trading from a mobile device, we read in the article.
Rohrbaugh and longtime executive Eddie Wen, who also joined JPMorgan from Goldman around the same time as Rohrbaugh, both helped bring quants and technologists “into the front office so the firm could take responsibility for the developing its own system rather than relying on a separate IT department,” Euromoney reported in 2017.
JPMorgan executive David Hudson told the publication that he returned to JPMorgan after working at Nomura in 2010 “to work for Troy.” He saw how the company had “matured after five years. It was clearly much more aggressive and capable, and there was a big focus on electronic distribution and risk management.”
Although his profile is less familiar to outside observers, Rohrbaugh’s name is well known at JPMorgan, the forex industry and advocacy groups. He is a former chairman of the Foreign Exchange Committee of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and chairman of the Foreign Exchange Panel of the Global Financial Markets Association. He is also familiar with regulators, being on Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler’s calendar of meetings with other top JPMorgan executives in 2022 and 2023.
Rohrbaugh’s other stops at JPMorgan were head of global markets and head of macro markets. Before working at Goldman, Rohrbaugh ran the Asian foreign exchange options business for Canadian bank Banque Nationale and began his career trading options for CooperNeff on the Philadelphia Stock Exchange.
Rohrbaugh’s career spans the dot-com bust, the global financial crisis and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, which devastated so many on Wall Street working in Lower Manhattan.
While Rohrbaugh was at Goldman, his firm was near the World Trade Center and suffered losses during the attacks. According to the New York Daily News, she was one of the last people to speak to Cantor Fitzgerald broker Tim Soulas, who was killed. Cantor lost 658 employees in the attacks that day.
Rohrbaugh before Wall Street
The Baltimore native’s first work experience, however, wasn’t in a trading pit.
“I was 16 years old and I was a security guard at a condo at Seaside,” he said in a series of interviews published by JPMorgan in 2015 about executives’ early jobs. “I worked at my father’s company for about 40 hours during the week, then I worked another 36-38 hours from Friday evening until early Sunday morning.”
Rohrbaugh remains involved at his alma maters Maryland. He serves on the board of trustees of the Gilman School, an all-boys preparatory school from which Rohrbaugh graduated in 1988.
He graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 1992, where he studied political science, played football and now serves on an advisory board. In a video addressed to the university’s football team last year, he said that “pride and poise,” a slogan used by the football team, are two characteristics that have helped him as a player and in his career.
He said that in addition to being prepared while under pressure, “you have to be calm, thoughtful and ready for when things don’t work out.”
He was president of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity while attending Johns Hopkins, where his fraternity brothers embraced a special tradition of throwing dozens of shoes out the window and into a tree outside the fraternity house east of the university campus, the Baltimore Sun reported in 1992 .
Students would leave the house, forget something and yell at their roommates to throw their items out the window, Rohrbaugh told the newspaper. Once that object was a pair of shoes and it got caught in the tree. “From then on, every time you wore out a pair of shoes, or your roommate had really smelly feet and a tendency to leave their shoes there
Tensions upon returning to office
In the years of back and forth between what management at Wall Street firms and the broader workforce want regarding remote work during the pandemic, Rohrbaugh has been described as a vocal supporter of in-person work. According to reports, this irritated some employees early in the pandemic.
He is one of many financial executives who have spoken publicly about their desire to have more employees work in person rather than at home.
Bloomberg reported that in March 2020, while New York was under a state-mandated lockdown, a JPMorgan employee wrote in a memo to colleagues that Rohrbaugh continued to “want to push everyone back to the office,” which JPMorgan disputed throughout era. .
A senior JPMorgan executive who works with Rohrbaugh recalled that time during the pandemic. This person said on Wednesday that they had managed trading operations well during Covid and had taken “tremendous” precautions for staff.
Kaja Whitehouse and Alex Morrell contributed reporting.
going around they would end up in the tree,” he said.
“You learn a technique after you’ve been here,” Rohrbaugh said. “You can always tell that to a freshman or sophomore because it will miss the tree three or four times, and when it finally hits it, it won’t wrap.”