Pam Codispoti

The mastermind behind the industry-shaping Chase Sapphire Reserve Card sets her sights on banking

- Jennifer Surane

PAM CODISPOTI HAD A DILEMMA. She’d been brought on by JPMorgan Chase & Co. to develop a credit card for affluent millennials in 2014—a time when no one thought the group wanted credit cards.

“We found that just not to be true,” says Codispoti, who was president of Chase’s branded cards unit. “What they were looking for was something different than what the market had to offer at the time. They weren’t interested in their father’s credit card.” So the 52-year-old executive and her team embarked on a listening tour in living rooms and coffee shops across America to find out what millennials wanted out of a premium card. The answer? Something that offered flexible rewards for the categories they cared about: dining and travel.