<\/p>\n
JPMorgan Chase employs about 17,000 people in North Texas and has expanded its downtown Dallas office overlooking Klyde Warren Park.<\/p>\n
Shafkat Anowar\/Staff photographer<\/p>\n
The world\u2019s largest bank has its eyes on North Texas.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
From providing $400 million in backing for AT&T\u2019s forthcoming $1 billion Plano headquarters<\/a>, to helping local middle-market business scale, JPMorgan Chase has its fingers in many pots across Dallas-Fort Worth. Internally, the bank employs about 17,000 people in North Texas and has expanded its downtown Dallas office overlooking Klyde Warren Park.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Last Thursday, The Dallas Morning News spoke with John Simmons, co-head of global banking, and Belen Garren, region manager for middle market banking in North Texas and Oklahoma.\u00a0<\/p>\n The duo shared insights about the flourishing business and finance landscape in Dallas, investment opportunity in the region and the AI investment<\/a> boom.<\/p>\n Responses have been edited for length and clarity.<\/p>\n Make Dallas News a preferred source so your search results prioritize writing by actual people, not AI.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Add Preferred Source<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Question: JPMorgan Chase has been in North Texas for a while. How are you all thinking about the growth of the region as a financial center?<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Simmons: \u201cThe thing that I\u2019ll sort of smile about a little bit, is we\u2019ve been here for 160 years, so we consider Texas home, and it\u2019s a bigger state in terms of our talent workforce than the state of New York, where we\u2019re headquartered. So it\u2019s not surprising to see others follow, but to us, we\u2019re executing the same play that we\u2019ve been executing for more than a century and a half. Texas as a state would be one of the largest countries in the world, and we think that a lot of the best days are yet ahead of it, and we\u2019re planning to be here in support.\u201d<\/p>\n Garren: \u201cWhat we\u2019re hearing within the market is that it\u2019s a growth mindset market. We have a very favorable business environment in terms of working and doing business. From a work-life balance, community aspect, we have an incredible culture here with parks, museums and a lot of investment that\u2019s happened over the last several years.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Scotiabank was coming into town<\/a>, Mike Rosa from the Dallas Regional Chamber reached out and said, \u2018Hey, Belen, would you speak to the group?\u2019 as they were doing their last tour to make a decision. And it was fun to get to brag on this community. We talked about the business-friendly environment. We talked about how it\u2019s a great place to work and to live. It\u2019s also central, we have easy access to each coast.<\/p>\n \u201cAnother asset within North Texas, whether you\u2019re looking at the universities in Dallas and Fort Worth\u00a0\u2014 the colleges and community colleges\u00a0\u2014 it\u2019s a really, really phenomenal pipeline that helps drive both the financial services industry as well as industries more broadly.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Related story: How George W. Bush helped lure Scotiabank to Dallas<\/a><\/p>\n JPMorgan Chase\u2019s John Simmons (right), co-head of global banking, and\u00a0Belen Garren (left), region manager for middle market banking in North Texas and Oklahoma, pictured in the lobby of JPMorgan Chase\u2019s office in downtown Dallas.<\/p>\n Sasha Richie\/Staff writer<\/p>\n Question: AI investment is dominating the stock market, but there are disagreements about whether or not AI is a bubble that\u2019s about to burst<\/a>. What are your thoughts on this, and how does JPMorgan Chase use AI?<\/p>\n Simmons: \u201cIt is an incredibly powerful secular force in this economy and the global economy. You\u2019ve got unprecedented levels of capital expenditures<\/a>, which in many ways are a nice tailwind for the economy that are coming from the so-called hyperscalers of the capital markets. It\u2019s not uncommon to see firms individually spending $100 billion, $150 billion, $200 billion as an individual firm on capex. These numbers are pretty unprecedented.\u00a0<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n \u201cTo my own personal view, this is not cyclical. This is a secular change, and I think in many ways it will change every company in some way, large or small. We are spending a ton of time thinking about how it can accelerate our business, how we can serve our clients better, how we can do things faster, how we can do things cheaper. However much time you\u2019re spending on AI, you\u2019re probably not spending enough, in terms of how we\u2019re thinking about it.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThere will be, undoubtedly, lots of change in terms of opportunities and also in terms of how the workforce evolves. So to me, it\u2019ll be one of the most powerful forces that affects and changes the way we serve our clients and how they\u2019re thinking about navigating and adapting. You can\u2019t have a conversation with a company right now that doesn\u2019t in some way touch on AI.\u201d<\/p>\n Garren: \u201cYou think about folks that were coming in from an entry-level position, some of what they were doing previously was digging into data, number crunching, putting together decks. And now they\u2019re coming and there\u2019s tools that can help them. When they\u2019re walking in day one, they\u2019re able to leverage AI for those resources, and then taking more of a strategic view and lens as they\u2019re coming into conversations, as they\u2019re interfacing with their colleagues, and then also working with our clients.\u201d<\/p>\n Question:\u00a0J.P. Morgan led a $1 billion financing arrangement for MP Materials\u2019 Northlake \u201c10X\u201d rare earth magnet factory, part of a first-of-its-kind public-private partnership with the Department of Defense<\/a>, through JPMorgan Chase\u2019s Security and Resiliency Initiative<\/a>. How did the Security and Resiliency Initiative come about, and how will Texas fit in?<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n By signing up, you agree to our Terms Of Use<\/a> and acknowledge that your information will be used as described in our Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n Simmons: \u201cThe initiative was actually born out of something [chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon] is personally passionate about, where we think that there is an opportunity, and in many ways, as a patriot, an obligation, to help fortify and strengthen America and our allies\u2019 resilience, because it is an ever complex world.<\/p>\n \u201cWe have a program over the next decade to finance and facilitate $1.5 trillion dollars of capital\u00a0\u2014 a 50% increase from what our normal run rate would have been over a decade\u00a0\u2014 and we\u2019ve also decided to put $10 billion of equity behind that. That equity is coming off of our balance sheet to support the goals of the SRI program. We\u2019re looking at advanced manufacturing, supply chain, healthcare, aerospace and defense, quantum computing and AI\u00a0\u2014 all areas where we think there\u2019s an opportunity to strengthen and make more vibrant America\u2019s resiliency.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cJust within North Texas, there are 200-plus companies that would fit within the industry groups that I\u2019ve outlined that we are working to see, is there a solution that we can bring to bear to help them \u2014 in many cases, family-owned, founder-led businesses \u2014 invest in their businesses, fortify their supply chains and be able to increase production should there be an opportunity to do so?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"JPMorgan Chase employs about 17,000 people in North Texas and has expanded its downtown Dallas office overlooking Klyde…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":291251,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[97766,96672,102,104,103,88646,89397],"class_list":["post-291250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-business-technology","tag-business-philanthropy","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news","tag-tp-banking","tag-tp-ai-artificial-intellgience"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/291251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n
![\"image\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/04\/1775016909_917_rawImage.jpg\" "\\"#\\"")
<\/p>\n