ROBERT FRANCIS
rfrancis@bizpress.net
David Nolet is the Market Manager for J.P. Morgan Private Bank’s Fort Worth Region. Nolet leads a team that works with clients and prospects to grow and manage their wealth across multiple generations. Additionally, he represents the Private Bank on the Dallas-Fort Worth Market Leadership Team.
Prior to this role, Nolet was the Regional Banking Practice Lead for the Private Bank’s South and Southeast Regions, managing a $220 million revenue business across 15 offices. Before that, Nolet served as a Capital Advisor in the Private Bank, where he managed a $1.6 billion loan portfolio.
His career began in the Investment Bank with Chase Manhattan Bank.
Nolet is a familiar face in the community.
He serves as vice chairman of the Foundation Board for the University of North Texas Health Science Center and vice chairman of All Saints Health Foundation. He also serves as treasurer on the Executive Committee and Board of Trustees for the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History.
Nolet formerly served as a member of the Executive Committee of the Board of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra, the Executive Committee and Board of Directors of the Cliburn, and the American Heart Association Tarrant County Board of Directors, and he was on the Executive Leadership Team of the annual Heart Ball. He has chaired multiple J.P. Morgan employee contribution campaigns for North Texas.
Nolet graduated from Arlington Heights High School, then attended Texas A&M University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in accounting and a master’s degree in finance. He is a Certified Public Accountant in the state of Texas and holds the Series 7, 9, 10 and 63 licenses.
JPMorgan Chase traces its Fort Worth lineage – via numerous bank changes and consolidations – to Fort Worth National which eventually became part of Bank One which was then acquired by Chase.
JPMorgan Chase has about 12,500 employees in DFW, making it one of the region’s top employers. As part of its commitment to North Texas, it has built a world-class campus at Legacy West in Plano. Phase One of the campus is complete and is home to more than 6,000 workers. The bank has started construction of a 12-story building in Plano, an expansion that will bring campus employment to almost 11,000.
The Fort Worth Business Press spoke to Nolet about how the bank views Fort Worth and North Texas. Here are some lightly edited comments from the interview.
FWBP: Chase is a large, successful New York-based financial institution, but its roots are deep here. How does that work with what the bank does here?
Nolet: For an organization of our size, we’re given quite a bit of autonomy about how to manage the business, how to think about hiring, etc. When we’re putting together budgets, you have to have a lot of data and facts behind what you’re doing.
But as long as you are working hard, your business is growing and you continue to keep the trust of your clients and senior leadership in your team, we’re allowed to do things the right way for our business in Fort Worth because some of the things we might need to do here could be different than Atlanta or Miami or Boston.
As you think about our business here, and having been in Fort Worth since 1873, we are one of the larger offices for the United States Private Bank for JPMorgan. Our office is the same size as Miami, Boston, Washington, D.C., Denver. Those are all of our peer markets that we’re compared with and if you think about it, those are all much larger cities than Fort Worth.
How large is Chase’s presence in North Texas?
We’ve been moving thousands of jobs into North Texas that are a combination of new jobs and moving jobs into North Texas, which we’re really excited about and in particular our Plano Campus. It is a huge investment for the firm and we’re building yet another building out there to continue to bring those jobs.
And those jobs, they span a lot of things. You think about our firm from a cyber standpoint, but also from a technology standpoint, I mean, we’ve got thousands of technology jobs that we’re hiring into.
When people think of a bank, they think of walking into a branch. That’s a huge employment base but when we think about what we’re trying to do with technology and artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, I mean, we are hiring top technology people.
I think the good news is North Texas is viewed as a really strong base for employment within the technology sector. It’s been really exciting to see and our CEO, Jamie Dimon, estimates that Texas will be the largest state of employment [for Chase] in the U.S. within the next several years passing New York as we see more of that growth.
Nolet talked about how the employees Chase is hiring has changed over the years.
If I go back 10 years ago, hiring in Fort Worth, you were generally trying to find someone who was from Fort Worth. Out of college, out of grad school everyone wanted to go to Dallas or Houston if they wanted to be in the state.
From my recruiting standpoint, we hire people from out-of-state all the time that have never been to Texas. They’ve heard about our growth. They understand Fort Worth as a part of that growth. Even though the oil and gas industry is cyclical, they know that that’s a key driver of our economy, but it’s not the only driver of our economy, which you rewind back 20 years, you couldn’t really say that. I mean we’ve got a lot of different types of sectors built within here, within health care, advanced manufacturing. Alliance Airport’s huge for this area in our growth.
Nolet talked about some of the advantage of working in a large bank like Chase.
When we win is when we deliver the global firm.
Here in Fort Worth, we’re very local, which is really exciting. I feel we’ve been able to do it because our business has grown very materially here, specifically in the private bank. We can’t give numbers, but you can assume this is a very large business for us and our assets under management have grown by over 30% over the past three years.
And part of it is having the right staff and team who can execute.
I’d say the other thing on the hiring perspective, and this I think speaks a little bit to the autonomy of how we run the office here and frankly maybe to my background and personal bias, I tend to have more associates and that’s that person right out of grad school or maybe has five to seven or eight years of experience on a ratio basis. I probably have the highest number of associates of any market, certainly in the Southern United States, but probably one of the highest ratios.
And why is that? You’re bringing someone in, they’re young, they’re hungry, they’re at kind of stage two of their career they’ve done a few things, but they figured out in large part, “I want to do this, or I really want to invest in this.” They want to build a business and we partner them because we’re not a commission model alongside of senior bankers, senior investor to really apprentice and learn the business.
Nolet noted that bankers have been working hard during the current pandemic to help their customers during a challenging economic time.
Our business communities across Texas have been hit hard by the coronavirus crisis. I’m very proud of the thousands of JPMorgan Chase bankers who’ve worked long hours, holidays and weekends to support our clients. It’s during tough times that we show our capabilities and resolve.
About 85 percent of our branches have remained open here in Fort Worth as we help our customers with their daily banking needs.