Anxieties were already running high inside JPMorgan Chase last month, days after top leadership announced that employees would soon be required to work in-office full-time, when an executive found himself responding to a question about another contentious issue at the bank. 

An employee at a consumer-banking town hall in mid-January had asked Rohan Amin, the chief product officer of Chase, about the small salary bumps many workers had received—amid record profits of nearly $60 billion in 2024. Amin responded by saying that higher profits don’t necessarily translate to higher compensation.