JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon Acknowledges Possibility Bank Has Been Gouging Customers on Overdraft Fees: We ‘May be a Day Late and a Dollar Slow’

JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon addressed concerns on Wednesday over his bank’s overdraft fees, saying it may have been “a day late and a dollar short” in reforming its policies.

The comments came after he clashed with Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) over the fees at a May Senate hearing. Dimon refused to tell Warren how much JPMorgan collected in overdraft fees, leading to a contentious back-and-forth in which Warren called him the “star of the overdraft show.” The bank collected $1.46 billion in overdraft fees in 2020, according to federal regulatory filings, 2.4 times more per account than Bank of America and 4.9 times more than CitiGroup.

“You said the premise of the question was wrong,” Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo noted in a Wednesday interview with Dimon. “She said you have the number, $1.463 billion. Does that change anything? Did you make a change on overdraft fees?”

“There are sometimes legitimate complaints about banks and what people do and how we do it,” Dimon replied. “We changed overdraft fees and charging over an extended period of time and we always look at something like that so I asked the people look at it again, go through in detail. A lot of competitors are making changes. It may be a day late and a dollar slow. But if it’s appropriate we will make changes. We will do it if it’s competitive.”

The banking chief took a more cautious tone when Bartiromo followed up. “What do you mean, you’re going to eliminate overdraft fees?” Bartiromo asked.

“I don’t know about that,” Dimon said, adding that “people who bounce checks” incur additional costs when they fail to pay traffic tickets. “Remember, there’s a huge benefit to overdraft fees. I think people have to, again, take a deep breath.

“We’re trying to do the right things for clients, not have a knee-jerk reaction,” he added.

Watch above via Fox Business Network.