JPMorgan Chase launches American Dream Initiative to expand small business support across the US

JPMorgan Chase on Tuesday announced the launch of its American Dream Initiative (ADI), which will invest in communities around the U.S. through several focus areas, including one focused on driving the growth of small businesses and entrepreneurship.

The ADI aims to support small businesses by expanding their access to capital, providing advice and training, additional financial services, community investments and more.

Chase Business Banking CEO Ben Walter is leading the firm’s business growth and entrepreneurship pillar of the initiative and told FOX Business in an interview that, “We want to serve more and more small businesses to help them grow and thrive in their local communities, employ more people and drive economic success in their communities.”

“We support 7 million small businesses today. Over the next 10 years, we want to grow that to 10 million small businesses we support through core relationships. As part of that, we want to deploy $80 billion in credit to them over the next decade. That’s a lot of money any way you count it to help them grow their businesses,” Walter said.

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“Critically, we want to pair that with coaching and education,” Walter said, noting that the firm currently has a Coaching for Impact program with 87 coaches who provide free coaching to small businesses around the country through a nine-month program. JPMorgan plans to nearly double the number of coaches to 150 as part of the ADI.

Walter said the program makes small businesses “more credit ready – it makes them more able to borrow responsibly so that we can lend responsibly,” adding that it has graduated at least 12,000 clients through that program and the firm wants to increase that to 115,000 over the next decade.

“This is something where you have to put in some real elbow grease – so we do a lot of work, but we expect you to do a lot of work. But the clients who come out of that, typically they’re seeing higher growth, they’re hiring more employees, they’re more credit ready. We’ve seen a ton of success out of the program for the people who make the commitment,” Walter said.

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JPMorgan’s ADI is also broadening the array of services that the firm offers to small business clients. It previously allowed clients to run 401(k) plans through the firm and launched an invoicing service last year, and is planning to roll out payroll later this year and will add other services in the future, Walter said.

Other aspects of the ADI include connecting small businesses with healthcare coverage options through a resource center, as well as through supplier access programs for businesses looking to serve as suppliers for defense companies and government contracts. 

“We are going to have to build a much deeper supply chain in the U.S. and if you look at the industries where we still do manufacture at scale in the U.S. – energy, auto – they all have a huge network of small suppliers and defense is going to be one of them,” Walter said.

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The ADI program will also see JPMorgan leverage the firm’s expertise to help capitalize on development opportunities in communities through working with local entrepreneurs, government officials, philanthropists and other leaders to develop key commercial corridors in communities.

“This is a long-term commitment to deepening our participation and support of the small business ecosystem in America,” Walter said. “I tell people all the time the small business ecosystem in America is one of the things that distinguishes it from other developed economies – small businesses employ 44% of American workers, and they create two out of every three new private sector jobs.”

“The cynical person would ask, ‘Well, if you grow like this, aren’t you going to make more money?’ Yes, and so will our clients, and so will their communities, and won’t that be good? We need to stop thinking of commercial initiatives as a bad thing. They’re a really great thing because I can’t recycle a dollar of philanthropic capital, but I can recycle a dollar of commercial capital,” Walter added.