Companies Owned by JPMorgan Chase (2026)

Who actually owns the Chase and J.P. Morgan brands in 2026?

The answer to almost every “who owns this” question about Chase or J.P. Morgan is the same: JPMorgan Chase & Co., a publicly traded holding company that trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker JPM. Chase is not a separate company you can buy shares in, and neither is J.P. Morgan. They are two brand names — two trade names — used by the one parent company and its subsidiaries to serve different kinds of customers.

People search for “companies owned by JPMorgan” expecting a long list of household names, and the accurate version is narrower than the rumor. The bulk of what JPMorgan “owns” is its own operating divisions wearing the Chase or J.P. Morgan badge, plus a focused set of acquired companies that fill specific gaps. It is not a sprawling conglomerate of unrelated consumer brands the way a holding empire like Berkshire Hathaway is. A bank holding company tends to buy things that make its banking, payments, or wealth franchise stronger, and that focus is visible once you list the real acquisitions rather than the assumed ones.

Every one of those brands sits inside a corporate structure made of subsidiaries, and the parent at the very top is incorporated in Delaware. That is the thread this page pulls on: the same legal vehicle a roughly $4-trillion-asset bank uses to hold its US operations is available, in single-entity form, to a founder forming their first company. The mechanics scale down cleanly to a single Delaware LLC.

For a founder, the lesson is the same shape at a smaller scale: the legal entity and the brand are not the same thing. You can run several brands and product lines under a single Delaware LLC, exactly as a bank runs Chase and J.P. Morgan under one Delaware parent corporation.

Why is JPMorgan Chase incorporated in Delaware and not New York?

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is headquartered in New York City, yet its state of incorporation is Delaware, where it was incorporated as a financial holding company in 1968. That split — operate where your people are, incorporate where the law is settled — is one of the most common patterns in American corporate life. A majority of large US public companies choose Delaware as their legal home regardless of where their offices sit, and JPMorgan Chase is part of that majority.

The reasons are the same ones that draw smaller companies: a deep, predictable body of corporate case law, and the Delaware Court of Chancery, a specialized business court where judges rather than juries decide corporate disputes. For a public company with millions of shareholders and constant governance questions, that predictability is worth a great deal. The same logic scales down to a founder choosing a Delaware C-corp or a Delaware LLC: you incorporate in Delaware for the legal framework, not because you need a physical office there. Read more about the formation route on our Delaware LLC formation overview.

It is worth being precise. The Delaware-incorporated entity is the holding company, JPMorgan Chase & Co. Its principal bank, JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., is a federally chartered national bank, governed by federal banking law rather than by any single state charter. Many of its other subsidiaries are organized in Delaware as well. So when someone says “JPMorgan is a New York bank,” they are describing where it operates, not where it is legally born. The legal birthplace — the state whose law governs the company’s internal affairs, board duties, and shareholder rights — is Delaware. That separation between operational home and legal home is the same one a remote founder relies on when forming a Delaware LLC while living thousands of miles away.

Which acquired companies does JPMorgan Chase genuinely own?

Beyond the Chase and J.P. Morgan brands, JPMorgan Chase has bought a string of businesses outright. The following are acquisitions that were publicly announced and completed, where JPMorgan took ownership rather than merely partnering or investing a minority stake. Where a date is well documented it is given; where a brand has been folded in or renamed, that is noted rather than glossed over.

• First Republic Bank (2023). Acquired May 1, 2023 in an FDIC-assisted transaction after First Republic was closed and placed into receivership; its operations were folded into Chase.
• Nutmeg (2021).A UK digital wealth manager, now the basis of J.P. Morgan’s UK personal-investing offering.
• The Infatuation, including Zagat (2021). A restaurant-discovery platform used to power Chase card dining benefits.
• InstaMed (2019).A healthcare-payments company, reportedly JPMorgan’s largest acquisition since the financial crisis at the time it was announced.
• WePay (2017).A payments-technology firm integrated into JPMorgan’s merchant-services stack.
• FROSCH (2022). A travel-management agency supporting premium-card travel services.
• Global Shares (2022) and Aumni (2023). Share-plan and cap-table / investment-analytics software for private-market clients.

Each of these is a real, completed acquisition, not a marketing partnership. They show how a Delaware holding company expands: it buys operating businesses and tucks them under the parent, where they keep their own brand for a while and are sometimes rebranded over time. The same legal mechanics — one parent, many subsidiaries — are available to any business that wants to hold multiple ventures cleanly, just at a vastly smaller scale.

A second pattern worth naming is how brands behave after they are bought. Some keep their name for years because the name carries goodwill — The Infatuation and Zagat are still recognizable consumer brands, so JPMorgan kept them. Others are absorbed quickly because the value was the technology or customer base rather than the name, as happened when WePay folded into JPMorgan’s payments stack. And some, like Nutmeg, are gradually rebranded toward the parent’s own name once the acquired customer base trusts the new owner. None of this changes the underlying ownership; it only changes the label customers see, which is exactly why an honest ownership list has to look past the brand name to the legal entity underneath it.

How do these brands map to JPMorgan’s business segments?

JPMorgan reports its results in a handful of segments, and the brands above slot into them. Seeing the map makes it clearer why a bank owns a restaurant guide and a travel agency: most of the consumer-facing acquisitions support the Chase card and banking franchise, while the institutional software acquisitions support the J.P. Morgan private-markets and wealth businesses.

Reading the map this way answers the question that puzzles most people: why does a bank own a restaurant guide at all? The answer is that premium credit cards compete on experiences — dining reservations, curated lists, travel perks — and owning the platform that supplies those experiences is cheaper and more controllable over time than renting it from a third party. The same logic explains the travel agency and the payments firms. Each acquisition is a vertical slice that plugs into an existing customer relationship, which is the disciplined way a Delaware holding company grows rather than collecting unrelated trophies.

The pattern is consistent: a Delaware-incorporated parent uses acquisitions to fill gaps in its consumer and institutional offerings. You do not need to be a bank to use this structure — a holding LLC that owns several smaller LLCs is the small-business version of exactly the same idea, and most founders never need anything more than a single LLC to start.

Which brands are commonly mistaken as owned by JPMorgan but are NOT?

This is where most ownership lists go wrong, so it deserves its own section. The difference between owning a company and merely partnering with it — or having once owned and since wound it down — is a real legal and financial distinction. The items below are frequently attributed to JPMorgan today and should not be.

There is a deeper reason these mix-ups happen with a company like JPMorgan: it touches almost everything in consumer finance, so people assume it owns the rails it merely rides on. Issuing a Visa card, settling payments through a network, or letting customers send money over Zelle are all relationships, not ownership. A partner can walk away or change terms, while a subsidiary is controlled — and that distinction matters for anyone trying to map who really controls a brand. The Frank case is the sharpest illustration: JPMorgan bought the student financial-aid startup in 2021, then wound it down after a fraud case, so listing it as something JPMorgan “owns” in 2026 would be wrong. The honest version of an ownership list omits anything you cannot confirm, flags partnerships as partnerships, and drops anything that has since been shut down.

The same care applies in reverse to small businesses. Being a reseller, an affiliate, or an authorized partner of a larger company is not the same as owning a stake in it, and your contracts and marketing should say which one is true. This is one reason founders register their brands and assets under a single, clearly defined Delaware LLC rather than leaving ownership ambiguous.

Why does Delaware suit a parent company that owns many brands?

A holding company exists to own other companies. Delaware is particularly well suited to that role because its law is built around the relationships between a parent, its subsidiaries, its directors, and its shareholders, and because the Court of Chancery resolves disputes about those relationships quickly and predictably. When a parent owns dozens of subsidiaries — as JPMorgan Chase does — that legal clarity compounds in value across every contract, financing, and acquisition.

The structure also keeps liabilities walled off. If one subsidiary faces a claim, a properly maintained corporate structure helps keep that claim from automatically reaching the parent or the sibling companies. That separation is the entire point of a limited liability entity, whether it is a multinational bank holding company or a one-person Delaware LLC. The protection is not automatic, though — it depends on keeping each entity genuinely separate, with its own records and its own bank account. This is general information, not legal advice; confirm your own structure with a qualified attorney.

A third reason is acquisition mechanics. Because Delaware merger law is so well understood, lawyers on both sides of a deal can model exactly how a transaction will work before signing. When JPMorgan absorbed InstaMed, WePay, Global Shares, Aumni, and the assets of First Republic, each deal needed an entity to take ownership and a clean way to hold the result. Delaware subsidiaries make that routine. The same predictability that helps a bank close a multibillion-dollar acquisition also helps a small company take on an investor, add a co-founder, or sell the business later, because the rules everyone is operating under are settled and tested.

How does a single founder use the same Delaware vehicle JPMorgan uses?

You do not need a holding company, a board, or a stack of entities. For almost every founder, the right starting structure is one Delaware LLC. It gives you a recognized US legal identity, a wall between your business and your personal assets, and a clean base from which to open banking and accept payments. The formation route is the same Delaware LLC formation path, adapted so it works even if you have no US Social Security number, visa, or address.

In practice the sequence is short. You confirm an available name, we file the Certificate of Formation with a Delaware registered agent included, and your LLC legally exists in about 48 hours. From there you apply for an EIN for your Delaware LLC, which takes 2 to 4 weeks for applicants without an SSN, and then you move on to banking and payments. The full walkthrough lives on our how it works page, and the non-resident specifics are on our Delaware LLC for non-residents guide.

The contrast with JPMorgan is the point. A bank runs hundreds of entities because it operates hundreds of distinct businesses and lines of regulation across the world. You run one because you have one. Same state, same legal framework, vastly simpler footprint — and a setup you can complete remotely from anywhere. There is no requirement to ever graduate into a holding-company structure; most founders run a single LLC for the life of the business and never need a second entity. The layered-subsidiary model JPMorgan uses is a response to complexity that a one-business founder simply does not have, and adding entities you do not need just multiplies filings and annual fees for no benefit.

Once your LLC is formed and the EIN is issued, the practical next step is US banking. You can open a US business bank account in the company’s name even as a non-resident: fintech banks such as Mercury, Relay, and Wise onboard founders entirely online, and approval typically lands within 1 to 5 business days after the EIN is in hand. Approval is always the bank’s own decision, never ours, so we help you present a clean application and apply to more than one provider if the first does not work out. Our Delaware LLC banking guide walks through the options. If you sell online, you will likely also want Stripeto accept card payments; Stripe approval is the provider’s decision too, and a clear business description with consistent details across your formation documents, EIN letter, and application is what helps a review go smoothly.

What does this cost, in year one and year two?

A founder’s Delaware LLC costs a tiny fraction of what a public holding company spends on compliance. Our service is a single flat fee of $397, and the Delaware state filing fee is already included — there is no separate state charge bolted on at checkout. That covers the Certificate of Formation, the EIN application, a registered agent for year one, your operating agreement, and US bank and Stripe application support. The table below lays out the recurring picture so there are no surprises in year two.

The one ongoing state obligation for a Delaware LLC is the flat $300 franchise tax, due June 1 starting the year after you form. There is no annual report for an LLC. Miss the June 1 deadline and Delaware adds a $200 penalty plus 1.5% interest per month, and the LLC loses good standing — which is exactly why we track the date for you. The full breakdown is on our Delaware LLC cost page and our Delaware franchise tax guide.

It is worth clearing up one of the most common points of confusion here, because it directly involves the difference between you and a company like JPMorgan. Delaware calculates corporate franchise tax using two methods — the authorized shares method and the assumed par value capital method — and those calculations can produce very large bills. They apply only to Delaware corporations, the entity type JPMorgan’s parent and many of its subsidiaries use. They do not apply to LLCs at all. A Delaware LLC pays a single flat amount: $300 per year, full stop, with no share-based math and no annual report to file. So while a giant bank keeps tax teams busy working through corporate franchise-tax methods across many entities, your single LLC faces one predictable number each June. If you ever did want a corporation instead — for example to raise venture capital from US investors who expect a C-Corp — the heavier compliance is covered on our Delaware C-corp page, and the wider tax picture is on our Delaware LLC taxes overview.

What federal filings do non-resident founders need to know about?

You can form and own a Delaware LLC from outside the United States with no US Social Security number, no ITIN, no visa, and no US address. The EIN is obtained with Form SS-4, which the IRS processes by fax or mail for non-resident applicants — the reason it takes 2 to 4 weeks rather than minutes. A single-member Delaware LLC is a pass-through by default, so profit flows to the owner rather than being taxed at the entity level, though whether a non-resident ultimately owes US income tax is a fact-specific question best confirmed with a qualified CPA.

The one federal filing most non-resident single-member owners must not miss is Form 5472. If a non-US person owns 25% or more of a single-member Delaware LLC treated as a disregarded entity, the IRS requires Form 5472 each year, attached to a pro forma Form 1120, reporting transactions between you and your LLC. The penalty for failing to file is $25,000 under IRC 6038A, and the return is due April 15 (extendable with Form 7004). We track this for the founders we work with; the detail is in our Form 5472 for Delaware LLCs guide.

On beneficial-ownership reporting, the rules changed meaningfully in 2025, and it is worth being careful about how you describe them. A FinCEN interim final rule issued in March 2025 removed the BOI reporting obligation for US-formed domestic reporting companies, leaving only certain foreign reporting companies registered to do business in the US within scope. That is a significant shift from the framework many older guides describe, and the area is still evolving. The responsible approach is to confirm the current FinCEN position at the source before relying on any summary, rather than treating previously published deadlines as if they remain in force. One more practical number worth knowing if you sell online: the 1099-K reporting threshold is back to payments exceeding $20,000 and more than 200 transactions, after the OBBBA repealed the proposed $600 threshold.

How does the JPMorgan structure compare to a founder’s options?

JPMorgan Chase & Co. is a Delaware C-corporation because it needs public-market stock, a board, and a governance framework built for millions of shareholders. Most founders do not need any of that on day one. The comparison below orients the choice; it is general information, not legal advice, so confirm the entity type with an advisor before you decide.

Notice that the holding-company row is the JPMorgan pattern in miniature: it makes sense precisely when you have many separate businesses to keep apart, each with its own liabilities, contracts, and possible buyers. That is the situation a bank lives in every day, and it is why Delaware subsidiaries stacked under a parent are worth the overhead for them. For a founder with one business, that same machinery is pure unnecessary cost — more filings, more annual franchise taxes, more bookkeeping, and no added protection you would actually use.

So start with one Delaware LLC. It gives you the recognized US identity, the liability separation, and the clean banking base that the giants get from their Delaware subsidiaries, without the apparatus they carry to manage hundreds of them. If your plans later call for outside investment, our Delaware C-corp guide explains when the corporate route earns its extra weight, and our how it workspage shows the full path from name check to a funded account. Either way, you can begin the whole process remotely, today, from anywhere in the world — the same Delaware framework JPMorgan’s parent relies on, available to you for a flat $397 with the state filing fee included.

Many of these companies chose Delaware for the same reasons founders do today — the Court of Chancery, flexible LLC statutes, and strong privacy protections. Form your Delaware LLC for $397, all-inclusive, in 48 hours. Form your Delaware LLC → | Read the complete Delaware LLC guide →