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JPMorgan Chase ranks among the world's leading financial-services businesses, boasting $1.3 trillion in assets, a major U.S. consumer-banking franchise and operations in more than 50 countries. Created from a succession of mergers over recent years, JPMC prides itself on legacy institutions--Bank One, Chase Manhattan, Chemical, First Chicago, J.P. Morgan, Manufacturers Hanover and National Bank of Detroit--that evoke a colorful history of entrepreneurship and banking innovation going back more than 200 years, to the founding of its earliest predecessor in 1799.

With a corporate headquarters in New York City and retail- and commercial-banking operations run from Chicago, JPMorgan Chase (nyse: JPM - news - people ) covers most of the main banking segments: investment banking, consumer financial services, small-business and commercial banking, financial-transaction processing, asset and wealth management, and private equity.

The $58 billion merger with Bank One, in July 2004, was among JPMC's most ambitious deals to date, marking the return to Wall Street of Jamie Dimon, Bank One's former president and chief executive officer, who took over as president and CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase in early 2006.

Jamie Dimon is well known for his roles at Citigroup (nyse: C - news - people ), its subsidiary Salomon Smith Barney, and its predecessor Travelers Group, where his energy, eye for detail, and firm approach to cost cutting first attracted attention. In this McKinsey Quarterly interview, he spoke with McKinsey Director Clay Deutsch about the benefits and disadvantages of scale, the challenge of integration, the difficulty of balancing acquisitions and organic growth, and what he expects from the people who run individual business units.

How would you describe the business model of JPMC?

Jamie Dimon: It's large. It's global. It's diversified. We have six business lines--investment banking, retail, card, commercial banking, treasury, and asset and wealth management--and I remind people that not one of those lines of business is worse off by having the other five. So start from that vantage point. In fact, I'd go the other way around: every single one is better off because of the other five.

Which business lines tend to collaborate?

Card and retail do a lot of business with each other. And for all our middle-market clients we have retail branches, which actually service small businesses and the middle market too--kind of like a back office for their payroll and cash and collection and things like that.

The commercial bank does a lot of business with the investment bank. In fact, I think they both give each other a fairly large competitive advantage, which we're working on now. If you look at our last quarterly release, for the second quarter of 2006, you can see they do a lot of business together. There is a lot of business that the investment bank alone couldn't do, because it didn't have local relationships in places like Indianapolis [Ind.] and Tucson [Ariz.], which the commercial bank has. And there was a lot of business that the commercial bank couldn't do alone, because it didn't have the products that the investment bank has.

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