Dive Brief:

• JPMorgan Chase reported profit of $8.52 billion for the quarter ending Dec. 31, an increase of 21% compared with $7.07 billion a year earlier. 

• CEO Jamie Dimon said the bank’s corporate and investment bank generated record fourth-quarter revenue, rebounding from what he called “a challenging prior year.” Net income for the unit rose 48% to $2.9 billion for the quarter.

• Revenue rose 9% to $28.33 billion from $26.11 billion a year ago, the bank also reported.

Dive Insight:

It was a stellar year for JPMorgan Chase. The country’s largest bank reported annual earnings of $36.4 billion, the most of any bank in U.S. history, according to Bloomberg. 

Bond trading revenue was up 86%​ to $3.4 billion for the quarter, the bank reported. 

JPMorgan Chase CFO Jennifer Piepszak last month called trading revenue “meaningfully” higher in Q4 compared to the prior year, and KBW analyst Brian Kleinhanzl attributed the rebound to the industry’s fixed-income trading operations, projected to rise 25% on average, versus a 3% bump in stock trading revenue, according to CNBC. 

Dimon said the bank will continue to grow its physical branch network and has added more than 70 branches in 16 new markets in 2019. 

Dimon also emphasized the bank’s strategies for technology investments. 

“We continue to make large investments in technology, including AI, cloud, digital and payments, as well as other investments in innovation, talent, security and risk controls,” he said in a statement. “These actions will help us continue to grow and serve our clients going forward.”

Dimon and Piepszak also addressed the bank’s recent move to ban third-party apps from accessing customer passwords​.

“Our customers’ data privacy and security is of utmost importance to us," Piepszak said during a call with analysts​. "We think, over time, the best way to do that as securely as we can is to have third-party apps only access data through our [application programming interfaces]." 

JPMorgan Chase said this month that it plans to issue tokens for access to a limited amount of data in a secure form.

“We are working name by name to get those agreements in place,” Piepszak said. “We hope through time that that is exclusively the only way for third parties to access our customers’ data.”

Aggregator Yodlee has agreed to use tokens for all of its interactions with the bank, and data aggregator Plaid has signed up to start using tokens.

The bank also intends to give customers the ability to select and “turn off” any data they choose not to share, Dimon said. 

“That data is the data that the customer agrees to give them on the basis they agree to give it to them. So it’s not unlimited access to customer data,” Dimon said during the call.