JPMorgan Chase co-COO Gordon Smith spoke at a conference hosted by Bernstein Strategic Decisions Conference where he discussed the bank’s mortgage business, payments and branches; finding efficiencies in the mortgage process is a key focus, Smith explains according to American Banker, “Can we make the mortgage experience much simpler for the customer to understand with a much more certain outcome in terms of when the mortgage is likely to close and take out an awful lot of the processing that takes place to cut cycle times as well.”; they see early signs that new branches are paying off and overall only 5 of more than 5,000 branches are failing to turn a profit; Smith also talked about the effects of the trade war and their struggles to grow Chase Pay. Source.