Months before JPMorgan Chase bought financial aid startup Frank, employees expressed disbelief when their CEO, Charlie Javice, told them to change the company’s website to show it had more customers than it really did, according to the latest court filing from JPMorgan Chase.
It was January 2021, and Javice was meeting with an investment bank that she hoped would take Frank on as a client, JPMorgan Chase said in a June 15 Delaware District Court filing. The entrepreneur was preparing to sell Frank, the company she founded several years earlier. She told her team to change Frank’s public-facing customer numbers, which would impact the company’s website and communications, to state that Frank had 4.25 million student customers, the court filing said. (“Please change the HP,” Javice Slacked on Jan. 19, 2021.) Javice justified the switch by telling certain members of her team that she had changed Frank’s reporting metric—website visitors would be treated as users, the court document said.
