According to Bloomberg Business, JPMorgan Chase’s asset-management unit, which oversees over $7 trillion in client assets, is immediately cutting all ties with external proxy-advisory firms like ISS and Glass Lewis. For the coming proxy season, it will instead use an internal AI-powered platform called Proxy IQ to manage votes and provide recommendations for thousands of U.S. company meetings. This move amps up pressure on the proxy advisory industry, which has recently faced political and regulatory scrutiny. The decision follows JPMorgan’s earlier step to stop using advisers for vote recommendations, relying on its in-house team instead. The bank believes it’s the first major investment firm to completely stop using these external advisers.
AI Votes The Shares
Here’s the thing about proxy voting: it’s a total chore that doesn’t really matter for any single investor, but the whole system collapses if nobody does it. So we outsourced it to a few firms. Now, JPMorgan is outsourcing it to an AI. And honestly? That’s probably fine. The whole point is to find a cheap, scalable solution for a problem where perfection isn’t required. Will Proxy IQ be more “management-friendly” or “woke” than the human advisers? Someone will care, but the economic impact of any single vote is so negligible that “good enough” AI analysis is likely sufficient. I wonder if they’ll just train the thing on ISS’s past voting records. Basically, it’s the logical next step in automating a boring, administrative task.
On-Cycle Chaos Returns
Meanwhile, in the world of high-finance human resources, the delicate detente over private equity recruiting has spectacularly blown up. Remember, banks like JPMorgan and Goldman had threatened to fire analysts who accepted PE jobs too early, and big PE firms seemed to agree to hold off. That lasted about five minutes. This week, first-year analysts—who just started their jobs last summer—were summoned to a whirlwind of PE interviews. One analyst got a 7:30 am invite, had offers by 9 pm, and secured a job starting in 20 months. They all basically skipped work to do it. So, did they call Jamie Dimon’s bluff? Now we see if the banks actually follow through with those firing threats. The whole system is deeply stupid, but the competitive dynamics make it almost impossible to stop.
The Ponzi Pattern
The piece also touches on a perennial truth about long-running frauds: they almost always need a Ponzi element to survive. You can’t just steal all the money and run if you want to keep the scheme going for years. You have to show fake returns and pay out some early investors to build credibility. It’s a pattern seen in everything from academic case studies to SEC filings. The structure creates a fragile illusion of success that eventually, inevitably, collapses under its own weight. It’s a reminder that when returns seem too good to be true, they often are—and the mechanics keeping it afloat might be hiding in plain sight, buried in complex transaction documents or regulatory filings.
