A quick refresher: JPMorgan accused Javice of juicing Frank's customer numbers in a lawsuit filed at the end of last year. The suit, which also named Frank's former chief growth officer Olivier Amar, claimed Javice inflated the startup's user numbers from roughly 300,000 to 4.25 million.
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Meanwhile, Javice's lawyer, Alex Spiro, previously told Insider that she was actually a whistleblower against the bank.
Well, it turns out that prosecutors and regulators aren't seeing it that way. Prosecutors charged Javice with wire fraud affecting a financial institution, securities fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy. The Securities and Exchange Commission also filed civil charges against her.
In particular, I appreciate Javice assuring an engineering director she allegedly propositioned about creating synthetic data to mimic actual users that it was legal and no one would end up in "orange jumpsuits."
Life sure does come at you fast.
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Look, it's easy to pick on Javice, but let me be frank about one thing. (I had to get at least one pun in here.)
This is still an awful look for JPMorgan.
According to the complaint, verifying Frank's user base was, understandably, a sticking point of the deal. After some jockeying back and forth, both sides agreed they would use a third party to "validate the coverage of the attribute data."
But the validator's report, per the complaint, just confirmed there was data in the various fields. It didn't actually verify the information was accurate.
Excuse me?!
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I get there are lots of hangups when it comes to sharing customer data. A little startup wants to get acquired by a big player. It shares all of its customer data and references and then *poof* the company's not interested and the startup's clients suddenly have new offers from the big player.
How can JPMorgan look at that report, which only checked the data fields were "populated versus null/blank," and be happy to push forward with the deal? Is this what due diligence is? I've joked about it before, but Taylor Swift really should teach a class on this stuff for Wall Street.
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