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The head of JPMorgan’s rapidly growing exchange traded funds business, Bryon Lake, has left the firm suddenly after steering the manager’s active ETF offerings to record heights.
JPMorgan Asset Management’s active ETF business has amassed more money from investors over the past year than any firm except Dimensional Fund Advisors, according to data from Morningstar Direct.
Overall, the manager now has about $169bn in assets under management in ETFs, including the $33bn JPMorgan Equity Premium Income ETF (JEPI), which launched in May 2020 and rapidly grew to become the world’s largest actively managed ETF last year.
It also dominates the smaller European active ETF sector, with a market share of 44 per cent at the end of March, according to figures from Morningstar.
Lake joined JPMorgan in 2017, spending time as head of international ETFs in London and head of Americas ETFs in New York before taking over as global head of ETF solutions in August 2021 under Jed Laskowitz, the manager’s chief investment officer and global head of asset management solutions. Lake previously worked for more than a decade at Invesco.
“Bryon Lake has informed us of his intention to leave the firm and we wish him well in future endeavours,” a spokesperson for JPMorgan Asset Management said on Tuesday.
The firm did not immediately name a successor to Lake, who was being made available for interviews as recently as Tuesday afternoon, just hours before his departure was first reported by Citywire.
JPMorgan last month hired ETF veteran Jon Maier from Global X, which has been hit by a wave of executive exits since late 2023. Maier, who rose to prominence overseeing model portfolios at Merrill Lynch, left his job as Global X’s CIO to become JPMorgan’s chief ETF strategist.
