JPMorgan Chase: Big Bank, Big Options
The country's biggest bank, with more than $2.3 trillion in assets, is an active player in peer-to-peer payments. Introduced in 2008, New York-based JPMorgan Chase's Quickpay P2P solution allows users to send and receive money using just their email addresses (at least one person involved must have a Chase account). Chase upgraded Quickpay last year, adding a recurring payments feature, for example. JPMorgan Chase also will participate -- along with Bank of America and Wells Fargo -- in clearXchange, the industry's first bank-owned P2P offering, enabling P2P payments among the customers of three of the country's four largest banks.
And this past May, having found that 10 percent of its checking accounts didn't produce enough revenue to cover their cost of maintenance, JPMorgan said it would steer its least-profitable checking customers toward prepaid debit cards to avoid increasingly unpopular overdraft fees. The bank charges $4.95 a month for the prepaid cards, which are targeted at customers with lower incomes who frequently overdraw their accounts or don't qualify for a checking account. The new debit cards, the bank says, will help generate new fees while cutting account maintenance costs. Given the impact of new regulations such as the Durbin Amendment, other banks should be listening. --J.C.
