Mobile app adds bond trading

Once a laggard in the online investing game, JPMorgan Chase now believes it is a leader.

The bank on Friday is set to unveil new tools that allow investors to research and purchase bonds and brokered certificates of deposit through its mobile app, CNBC is first to report.

Users can set up customized screens and compare bond yields on the same banking app or web portal that they use to check their account balances, according to JPMorgan executives. The moves are part of a concerted effort to beef up the bank’s credentials among investors who trade a few times a month.

“Our goal was to create an experience that makes it extremely simple for clients that want to buy fixed income,” said Paul Vienick, head of online investing at JPMorgan’s wealth management arm. “We’ve taken that exact thought process for the simplicity of [buying] stocks and ETFs and moved that into the fixed-income space.”

JPMorgan, the biggest U.S. bank by assets and a leader across most major categories of finance, is relatively puny compared with other online brokerages. Despite seeing steady gains in recent years as it added functions including the ability to buy fractional stock shares, the bank has only recently crossed $100 billion in assets under management, CNBC learned.

That pales in comparison to online investing giants including Charles Schwab, Fidelity or E-Trade, which have had decades to accumulate investors and acquire competing platforms.

The bank first attempted to snare more of the trillions of dollars that self-directed investors hold by launching a free trading service in 2018. JPMorgan called it “You Invest” and marketed the new name in a push that included prominent placement at the U.S. Open in tennis.

But by 2021, JPMorgan saw the brand wasn’t connecting the way it had hoped and pivoted to simply calling it the Self-Directed Investing platform.

That year, with the business managing about $55 billion in assets, CEO Jamie Dimon called out the firm’s product in his usual blunt way.

“We don’t even think it’s a very good product yet,” Dimon told analysts at a financial conference. “So we’re driving that thing.”

Part of JPMorgan’s pivot was to hire Vienick, a veteran of TD Ameritrade, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, in October 2021 to overhaul the bank’s efforts.

“There was a recognition that in wealth management, we have some catching up to do overall,” Vienick said in a recent interview at the bank’s midtown New York headquarters.

That also includes managing more money for wealthy Americans through financial advisors at physical locations, a push that was helped by JPMorgan’s 2023 acquisition of First Republic. JPMorgan banks half of the country’s 19 million affluent households but…