JPMorganChase 💘 Charlotte
- JPMorgan adding 145K SF in SouthPark,
- Scaling to 1,000 employees,
- Banker lunches at Laurel Park (DM Dan McCormick)
Way to go Carrie Galloway! Great reporting Tony Mecia!
JPMorganChase is consolidating its corporate space in Charlotte and adding 400 jobs at One Piedmont Town Center in SouthPark. (Photo: Tony Mecia/The Charlotte Ledger)
by Tony Mecia
Banking giant JPMorganChase says it plans to add 400 corporate office jobs in Charlotte in the next couple of years, adding to a string of recent job announcements in the city’s financial sector.
While uptown is widely considered the hub of Charlotte banking, JPMorganChase is consolidating and expanding in a different part of town: SouthPark. It signed a lease for 145,000 sq. ft. at One Piedmont Town Center, where it plans to have about 1,000 employees — up from 600 who work nearby today — when it opens in 2028.
The bank will take five floors and place its name atop the building, which is at 4725 Piedmont Row Drive, the company said. The building is in a development that includes condos and restaurants such as Duckworth’s Grill & Taphouse, Bentley’s, Summit Coffee, Peppervine and Del Frisco’s Double Eagle Steakhouse.
New York-based JPMorganChase, which is the country’s largest bank by assets, plans to add jobs across all lines of its business here — in its commercial and investment bank, private bank and consumer bank, said Carrie Galloway, head of the Carolinas for J.P. Morgan Private Bank.
“Charlotte is one of the foremost financial capitals in the world, and we were a little late to the game in this established market,” she said. “But we planted a stake and see the opportunity here in terms of business with our growing customer and client base, and the opportunity around talent. The talent here is incredible.”
She said the bank will post those jobs as they come open.
The Charlotte Business Journal first reported the signing of the lease earlier this month. The number of jobs JPMorganChase plans to create has not been previously disclosed.
JPMorganChase opened its first commercial banking office in Charlotte in 2011. Its first branch here opened in 2020, and it now has nearly 30 branches in the area — including on the site of the former Harper’s Restaurant at the corner of Fairview and Sharon roads in SouthPark.
The bank’s announcement of 400 new jobs this morning follows a hot streak of financial job announcements in Charlotte, including:
Japanese bank Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. said this month that it plans to add 2,000 jobs in Charlotte by 2032 — one of the biggest job announcements in Charlotte in recent years.
Los Angeles-based Capital Group said in March that it plans to create 600 jobs by 2031.
American Express said it plans to hire “a few hundred” people for its Charlotte office, which is opening uptown later this year.
California-based Pacific Life said in October that it plans to create 300 jobs in the next five years at the new Queensbridge Collective development in South End.
Citigroup announced last summer that it plans to create 510 jobs in Charlotte. It opened an office in Ballantyne last month.
Other regional and national banks are also growing in Charlotte, adding branches and employees.
Finance growing: The number of finance jobs in the Charlotte region has grown by 41% in the last decade, to about 127,000. That’s about double the growth rate of Charlotte-region jobs overall, according to a Ledger analysis of Labor Department data. About 9% of jobs in the Charlotte region are in finance, higher than the national average of about 6%.
Charlotte is an attractive place for financial firms because it is growing and has a strong base of workers in financial-related fields, stemming from years of Bank of America and Wells Fargo (and their predecessors) playing an outsized role in the city’s economy.
The announcement is also a win for SouthPark, where JPMorganChase will be a major employer, as other financial services projects move forward — like forthcoming new buildings getting ready to start for insurance company Amwins and TowneBank.
It’s natural that as Charlotte grows, companies will establish employment nodes in areas throughout the city, said Adam Rhew, CEO of SouthPark Community Partners, which works to promote and improve SouthPark.
“What we see is SouthPark continuing to be attractive to companies that want geographic proximity to where their talent is going to live and play,” he said. “People value the ability to be close to where they live and where they want to spend time when they’re not sitting at their desk.”
Tony Mecia is The Charlotte Ledger’s executive editor. Reach him at tony@cltledger.com.
