When New York’s J.P. Morgan Chase announced in January 2004 that it was buying Bank One, formerly the First National Bank of Chicago, there was much civic hand-wringing over the loss of the city’s last hometown banking giant.

This week, employees at Chase Tower celebrated the 20th anniversary of the deal’s closing with a commemorative brochure and free donuts.

While the $58 billion Bank One acquisition moved the headquarters to New York, it also saved potentially thousands of jobs and put Chicago at the center of what would become the nation’s largest bank.

“We ended up being a great bank,” said Jamie Dimon, 68, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, and the architect of the merger. ”We delivered to Chicago what we said we would deliver, and we did a good job.”

Without the merger, Dimon said, the struggling Chicago-based bank might not have thrived, or even survived, the post-millennium financial crises to come.

Founded in 1863, the First National Bank of Chicago was the city’s legacy financial institution for more than a century, marking its turf with the eponymous 850-foot Loop skyscraper built in 1969. The tower would go through a number of name changes during a flurry of millennium-era mergers.

The bank’s parent company, First Chicago, merged with NBD Bancorp of Detroit in 1995, with Chicago winning out as the headquarters. In 1998, Columbus, Ohio-based Banc One acquired First Chicago NBD, relocating to Chicago and changing the name to Bank One.

But the newly merged Bank One failed to meet expectations, with earnings disappointments, a falling stock price, factional in-fighting and the departure of top executives. In 2000, Bank One landed Dimon, a star New York banker and consummate dealmaker, to right the ship.

The son of a stockbroker, Dimon earned his MBA from Harvard in 1982 and began his financial career at American Express. He then moved on to Commercial Credit, which through a series of acquisitions over more than a decade, Dimon helped build into banking behemoth Citigroup.

The April 1998 megamerger of Citicorp and Travelers Group created what was then the largest financial services company in the world. But within months of the merger, Dimon was forced out as president by Sanford Weill, his longtime mentor and chairman of the company.

...continued

©2024 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.