In a single weekend, JPMorgan took on $173 billion in loans from a failed bank and told investors to expect an IRR above 20%.

On May 1, 2023, JPMorgan published a short deck explaining its acquisition of First Republic Bank from the FDIC.

It matters because it turned a banking crisis into a story investors could follow in a few minutes.

Below you'll learn the slide order, the metric choices and the risk framing you can reuse in your own fundraising deck.

Below is the full breakdown:

Inside you'll find:

First Republic didn't fail because of bad loans. It failed because its depositors left.

After Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed in March 2023, clients with large uninsured balances rushed to move their money. First Republic's deposits fell from $176.4 billion at the end of 2022 to $104.5 billion at the end of March, and that figure already included $30 billion placed by eleven of the largest U.S. banks to stabilize it. Without that lifeline, roughly $100 billion walked out the door in a single quarter.

For founders, this wasn't a distant Wall Street story. First Republic was a bank of choice for venture investors and startup teams. JPMorgan's own deck shows that 12% of its $172.9 billion loan book sat in capital call lines and business loans, the credit facilities funds use to bridge investments into companies like yours.

→ When confidence goes, the numbers on the balance sheet stop mattering. The story you tell is what buys time.

By the morning of May 1, the FDIC had seized the bank and sold it to JPMorgan. The deck had to explain, before markets opened, why that was a good decision.

Most people assume an acquisition deck opens with the target. This one doesn't.

The first content slide is about JPMorgan itself: a CET1 capital ratio of 13.8%, $1.4 trillion in cash and marketable securities, $488 billion in total loss-absorbing capacity, and #1 positions across consumer banking, investment banking, commercial banking and private banking.

The logic is simple. Investors were about to hear that the bank was absorbing a failed competitor during a crisis. Before any detail, JPMorgan answers the question sitting in every reader's head: can you afford this?

→ Earn the right to ask before you ask.

A founder's version of this slide is traction, team or an unfair advantage. If your deck opens with the problem and the market, consider whether the investor first needs a reason to believe you are the one who can solve it.

The transaction slide is where the deck earns its credibility. It puts the full structure on one page, including the parts that sound risky.

The most telling detail is the pairing. Every exposure appears next to the mechanism that limits it. Loans come with a loss share, leaving JPMorgan exposed to 20% of covered losses and to risks outside the agreements. A funding gap comes with term financing. A risky book comes with a haircut already taken.

→ The best deals aren't the cheapest. They're the ones where the downside is explicitly mitigated, and the deck shows how.

Founders tend to hide risk in an appendix or leave it for the Q&A. Investors will find it either way. Naming the risk on your own terms, with the mitigation right beside it, reads as control rather than weakness: a key customer concentration next to the pipeline that dilutes it, a regulatory question next to the counsel you've already engaged.

The pro forma slide could have been a wall of projections. Instead, it's four boxes with checkmarks.

On the left sit the assumptions behind them: a one-time post-tax gain of $2.6 billion at closing, about $2.0 billion of restructuring costs over 2023 and 2024, and an average risk weighting of roughly 25% on covered loans thanks to the loss share.

What JPMorgan left out is as important as what it included. There's no five-year model and no dozen KPIs. Bank investors judge deals on earnings, book value, capital and return, so those are the only four things on the slide.

For your deck, the equivalent question is: which three or four metrics does this investor actually use to decide? For a SaaS seed round that might be growth rate, net revenue retention and burn multiple. Show those clearly, and move everything else to the data room.

Numbers justify a deal. Fit explains why it belongs to you rather than anyone else.

JPMorgan makes that case with two visuals. A map shows First Republic's branches clustered in San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles and Boston, markets where JPMorgan is already strong. A caption adds that the branch footprint overlaps with nearly 50% of J.P. Morgan's wealth management balances.

Next to it, a donut chart breaks down the $172.9 billion loan book: 60% single-family mortgages, 13% multifamily, 12% capital call lines and business loans, 6% commercial real estate and 8% other. Below it sits a single line doing a lot of work: 8 basis points of cumulative losses in 37 years.

→ One visual plus one hard number beats a paragraph of adjectives.

Founders often write "strategic fit" or "large, underserved market" and stop there. Show it instead: a map of where your customers are, a chart of how your pipeline overlaps with a partner's, a single statistic that makes quality undeniable.

The last substantive slide answers a question investors rarely ask out loud: did you do the work, and do you know what happens next?

JPMorgan reports that more than 800 employees took part in due diligence, covering 20 business and functional areas from lending and cyber to tax and real estate, with senior management reviewing the loan and deposit tapes. Then it lays out the integration plan: clients bank as usual, employees are treated with care and redeployed where possible, some branches become J.P. Morgan wealth centers, and the private wealth platform moves into J.P. Morgan Advisors.

The deck closes with four takeaways that repeat the entire argument: strength, fit, returns and a constructive role in the banking system. A reader who skipped straight to the end would still get the whole story.

Here are the principles worth taking into your next deck: