JPMorgan says to add private bankers

Catherine Keating, chief executive officer of JPMorgan Private Bank, listens to a question from a Reuters journalist at the Reuters Wealth Management Summit in Boston, Massachusetts October 10, 2007.

BOSTON (Reuters) - JPMorgan Private Bank expects to increase the number of its U.S. bankers by about 10 percent annually over the next few years, the head of its U.S. business said on Wednesday.

"Over the last couple of years, we've tried to grow high single digits to about 10 percent a year in terms of private bankers, and we think that's about the right pace. So we will probably continue to grow at about that pace," Catherine Keating, chief executive of the private bank, said.

The private banking arm of JPMorgan Chase & Co (JPM.N) has already raised the number of advisers to about 370 from 325 about a year ago to bolster its presence in such regions as the West Coast, Keating told the Reuters Wealth Management Summit.

JPMorgan Private Bank's moves come amid rising competition in the $100 trillion wealth management industry.

Bank of New York Mellon Corp's (BK.N) wealth management division plans to roughly double its sales force in the next few years, a top executive told the Reuters Summit earlier Wednesday.

JPMorgan's Keating said both external hires and internally trained staff will contribute to the rise in payrolls at the private bank, which has $270 billion in assets under management.

She played down the possibility of JPMorgan Chase doing any immediate mergers or acquisitions in the wealth industry.

"We have a full-scale securities firm, we are one of the largest asset managers in the industry, and we are part of the third biggest bank in the country. We don't need to be driven to consolidate with anybody because we really have the basics of what we need," Keating said.

(Reporting by Muralikumar Anantharaman, editing by Jeffrey Benkoe)