JPMorgan Chase announced on Thursday that it would promote two executives to newly created co-president roles amid CEO Jamie Dimon’s succession plan. Marianne Lake, the CEO of JPMorgan’s consumer and community banking division and a potential successor of Dimon, has left the company.
Doug Petno and Troy Rohrbaugh, the new co-presidents, are no strangers to sharing power. Since 2024, the two have co-led JPMorgan’s commercial and investment banking divisions. Now, Petno will take on being the only chief executive of the commercial and investment banking division, while Rohrbaugh will take over Lake’s position to lead the consumer and community banking division. Both received onetime retention and continuity awards of $30 million, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) filing.
In a press release, Dimon said that the decision “reflects the Board’s confidence in [Petno’s and Rohrbaugh’s] extraordinary leadership capabilities, business performance, relationships, experience, and commitment to always doing the right thing.”
With the co-president appointment, the wait to see who will take over as CEO of the world’s largest bank by market cap just got a little longer. In February, at a JPMorgan investor day in New York City, Dimon said he would remain at the company “for a few years as CEO, and maybe a few after that, as executive chairman.”
“This is the biggest job in banking,” Michael Useem, a professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, tells Fast Company. “These bigger companies, the complexity and diversity of concerns they have are just unbelievable,” he adds.
“As a result, if you got two people who can sit, talk, quickly react—it doesn’t get better than that.”
Margarethe Wiersema, a professor at the UC Irvine Paul Merage School of Business, says that JPMorgan’s co-president announcement offers a clear pipeline that reassures investors and supports the company’s stability. “It’s always better to have more options than to have just one,” Wiersema tells Fast Company, adding that the company is “on a very good path.”
But that’s not always the case with company succession plans, Wiersema says. Companies tend to have poor succession plans, which can hurt their business and worry investors. As the average CEO tenure fell to a low of 7.2 years between the first and third quarters of 2025, companies with no clear succession plans could end up blindsided by their own lack of preparation. Earlier this year, Heineken faced a bind when CEO Dolf van den Brink stepped down with no clear successor and pressure from investors to hire an outsider for the first time.
While Petno and Rohrbaugh will lead different divisions under their co-president titles, contention can arise among leaders who operate under co-CEO titles, which Wiersema calls “a different animal.”
“If it isn’t articulated ahead of time as to who does what, then you’re going to have a conflict,” Wiersema says. “Somebody has to say, ‘you take care of this, and I take care of that.’ There is this issue of who really is the CEO of the company.”
Lindred Greer, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, says that the lack of clarity about “who does what and how to get things done” in a co-leadership situation can potentially lead to power struggles. The “power dynamic is inherently unstable and prone to conflict,” Greer tells Fast Company.
However, the numbers offer some optimism for the co-leadership model: According to an analysis of 87 public companies run by co-CEOs between 1996 and 2020, shared leadership generated average annual shareholder returns of 9.5%, compared with a 6.9% average for solo CEOs.
But the history of co-leadership is also mixed, and has taken different shapes across industries over the years.
During the 2008 financial crisis, Goldman Sachs’s Gary Cohn and Jon Winkelried served as co-presidents and co-COOs. From November 2021 to January 2023, Salesforce operated under a co-CEO model—but internal tension caused Bret Taylor to step down, leaving Marc Benioff as the company’s sole CEO. Over the last year, Oracle, Comcast, and Spotify have all operated under the co-CEO structure.
JPMorgan has instead built a “succession contest rather than shared leadership,” David Grossman, CEO of internal communications agency The Grossman Group, tells Fast Company. To investors, this signals that the succession plan is finally moving and narrowing in on two finalists, albeit with no clear timeline.
“The catch is the part that stays out of the press release,” Grossman says. “There is no finish date yet. Following Dimon is one of the hardest jobs in business, and naming two contenders does not make the final call easier. It just schedules it.”
The cost of this succession contest is the “talent that decides not to wait around for the result,” Grossman says. “Every time a board elevates two people, it sends a message to everyone who was passed over, and the strongest of them start taking calls,” he adds. “Marianne Lake leaving the same day is the first example, and she may not be the last.”
That can trickle down to the rest of the company, too.
“An organization copies the relationship at the top,” Grossman says. “Set up a contest, and people pick a side and start playing it.”