JPMorgan Chase & Co. is increasingly focused on creating seamless customer experiences and enhancing product offerings amid intense competition from fintechs, and it remains on the lookout acquisitions that can help it, according to one of its top consumer banking executives.

"Some fintechs have done a very, very good job of identifying gaps in products or services for particular customer segments, creating beautiful customer experiences, super-easy and intuitive, and earning the right from there to expand," Marianne Lake, the bank's co-head of consumer and community banking, said at an investor conference Sept. 14. "If we have gaps, we need to fill them, and we're working on it."

JPMorgan Chase has extended into this year a string of acquisitions that have ranged across its operations. In the consumer business, those deals have included the purchase of the company that owns the Zagat restaurant guide, a stake in a Brazilian digital bank, and a British robo-adviser to boost its initiative to enter the retail market in the U.K.

Across the company, "we would look to build or partner or buy anything that can meaningfully accelerate our ability to deliver strategically important products or capabilities to our core customers," Lake said.

Lake said she believes JPMorgan Chase has a strong position in the fintech realm, and described an evolution in the fintech phenomenon over the last few years from one where fintechs posed a "significant competitive threat, to fintechs looking to partner up, to a bit of both."

"There are obviously those that have grown and expanded and created a broader ecosystem, but still they are partnering up to add broader sets of capabilities and to get broader distribution. And we do have, I think, advantages in that space," she said.

Lake situated the recent spate of deals and partnerships involving buy-now, pay-later companies as a part of that dynamic.

"There is impressive adoption," she said of buy-now, pay-later offerings. "[But] I would posit to you that specifically buy-now, pay-later has a sort of natural ceiling in terms of the share of the unsecured lending market, which is why you're seeing those people consolidate and partner up" to achieve broader distribution and align with complementary products and services, she said.

Lake said that JPMorgan Chase's own card-linked buy-now, pay-later offering, which launched in the second half of 2020, "is scaling nicely ... including in customers that previously were not borrowing on our cards."

Still, Lake said that while "it is very rare that we see in our wheelhouse people who have products that are better than us, they quite often create experiences that are easier. And so we need to make sure that we're investing in our core customer experiences."

Lake also provided guidance on some key operating metrics across the bank. She said that despite headwinds created by the COVID-19 delta variant, card spending remains 18% or 19% above 2019 levels. She said that card payment rates have stabilized at high levels, in line with expectations, which means that card balances will not be the source of another reduction in the bank's net interest income forecast. JPMorgan Chase's most recent guidance is $52.5 billion for 2021.

Lake added that the bank expects the process of normalization in credit card performance metrics to take some time, with loss rates remaining relatively low into 2022.

She also touted the bank's move up to the top spot in nationwide deposit share, saying that it had achieved coverage of each of the Lower 48 states in August. The bank has opened about 220 branches out of about 400 planned as part of a multiyear market expansion strategy, with the new branches generating about $6 billion of deposits so far.