My Ultimate Sign-in System Made Me Invincible

Chapter 521  JP Morgan’s Board Meeting

Barely 2 hours after Nova Technologies made the announcement, the entire JP Morgan’s board were already in the main conference room.

They all received an emergency call from Whitlock, for all of them to assemble in the next two hours. Most had been curious about the emergency was about but when they saw Nova Technologies’ announcement, they could already more than deduce what the emergency call was about, and they all assembled within less than two hours.

Walking into the conference room, they knew that they were in for the meeting of their lives.

Whitlock was already seated at the head of the table when the last board member walked in. He didn’t wait for everyone to settle completely, before he started the meeting.

“Thank you all for coming on short notice,” he said. “I’ll be direct about why I called this meeting.”

He opened the folder in front of him and slid copies down the table.

“This morning I had a meeting with the CEO of Nova Technologies. In person. He came to my office.” He let that land for a moment. “He made JP Morgan a formal offer to become the official financial partner of the Lucid platform. What you’re holding is my summary of that conversation alongside the relevant platform figures from the Transparency Report that dropped last night.”

The room was already quiet but it got quieter.

Richard Hale, who had been with the board for eleven years, looked up from the first page. “Official financial partner. Define the scope.”

“Exclusive,” Whitlock said. “We build and deliver the wealth management infrastructure for every active creator in the Lucid ecosystem. This includes private banking relationship, investment portfolio management, tax structuring across jurisdictions, asset protection, estate planning, liquidity management. The full suite. It’s not a referral arrangement or a co-branded product. We delivers the infrastructure end to end.”

“Every creator,” said Margaret Voss, their head of consumer banking. “The announcement says all active creators regardless of tier.”

“Correct.”

She set the paper down carefully. “Our private wealth minimums exist for a reason, James. The administration cost on accounts below threshold isn’t recoverable under standard fee structures. We’d be servicing accounts at a loss.”

“Under standard fee structures,” Whitlock said. “Let me finish giving you the full picture before we get into the commercial mechanics. Because the commercial mechanics only make sense once you understand what we’re actually being offered.”

He walked them through it.

The Transparency Report figures first. $6.32 billion in viewer gifting in a single month. $595 million in in-game purchases. $2.5 billion in net company revenue. This was all from a platform that had launched four months ago with one thousand devices and a single announcement and was now generating monthly revenue that exceeded the annual GDP of several sovereign nations.

Then the creator economy breakdown. The distribution table. The bottom fifty percent earning between $48,000 and $720,000 per month. The top earners pushing into nine figures monthly. The figure that had made every person in the room stop when they read the report was that of a single anonymous creator earning $152 million in one month from viewer gifting alone.

Then the number that mattered most for this conversation.

“Nova Technologies is currently holding more than five billion dollars in unpaid creator earnings,” Whitlock said. “The withdrawal infrastructure doesn’t exist yet. The money is sitting inside the platform’s payment system. It has been accumulating since launch. Based on current creator economy growth, that figure is increasing by approximately two billion dollars per month.”

The room absorbed this.

Sandra Osei, who had been quiet since she sat down, looked up from the figures. “Seven billion by end of next month. Nine by the month after.”

“And growing,” Whitlock confirmed.

Hale had turned to the second page. “When creators begin withdrawing, that money moves somewhere.”

“Yes.”

“He’s offering us the somewhere.”

“He’s offering us the somewhere,” Whitlock said. “Exclusively. JP Morgan becomes the institution through which the Lucid creator economy connects to the global financial system. Every withdrawal, every account opening, every portfolio structure, every tax filing across every jurisdiction where a creator operates — it runs through us.”

The silence that followed was different from the earlier ones. It had a different quality. The board members who had come into this room already suspecting what the meeting was about were now confronting the reality of it in numbers they could put their hands on, and the numbers were doing something to the atmosphere.

Voss had her pen on the paper but wasn’t writing. “The administration cost problem is real, James. I’m not dismissing the headline figures, but twenty thousand accounts as a starting point — most of them below any threshold we’d normally consider — is an operational challenge we can’t ignore.”

“The commercial arrangement accounts for it,” Whitlock said. “The CEO wasn’t asking us to absorb a loss. The structure compensates for the administrative differential on lower-tier accounts. What he’s offering isn’t standard client acquisition economics. The lower-tier accounts are the cost of entry. The pipeline is the product.”

“The pipeline being the five billion sitting in their system.”

“And everything that comes after it. Growing by two billion a month. On a platform that is four months old.”

Another silence.

Thomas Reeves, their chief risk officer, spoke for the first time. He had been reading through the document methodically, line by line.

“The regulatory friction is going to be significant. Foreign account structuring for creators across dozens of jurisdictions. Currency controls in certain markets. The EU is going to be the hardest,” he said.

“I know,” Whitlock said. “The CEO knows. He specifically named the EU.”

Reeves held Whitlock’s gaze for a moment, then went back to the document.

Osei had been doing the calculation on her notepad. She set her pen down. “If the platform sustains current growth rates — and there’s no indication it won’t — the assets under management figure through this partnership within twelve months is in the range of forty to sixty billion. Conservatively.”

Nobody said anything.

Hale looked at Whitlock. “You said he came to your office this morning. Why now? What moved the timeline?”

Whitlock considered how to answer this. “The Transparency Report created visibility. The creator earnings figures are public now. The CEO read them last night and identified the problem — top earners with no financial infrastructure around income at a scale they’ve never encountered, and no framework for protecting it. He called his contact at midnight. He was in my office before business hours.” He paused. “He moved the timeline because a sixteen-year-old in Spain has earned $165 million over four months and hasn’t withdrawn a single payment because he doesn’t know what to do with it.”

The room was very quiet.

“That’s the reason he gave you?” Voss said.

“That’s the primary reason he gave me,” Whitlock said. “He was clear that it wasn’t only commercial logic. He said the kid earned it legitimately and deserved to have someone make sure it actually changed his life rather than becoming a liability.”

Several people around the table looked at their documents again. Not because there was anything new to read. Because they needed somewhere to put their eyes for a moment.

Reeves was the one who brought it back. “The market has already moved. Two hundred and ten billion in two hours since the announcement.”

“I’m aware.”

“Our shareholders are aware. Our institutional investors are aware. The analyst community has already begun coverage. The announcement didn’t name us but the market connected the dots within the hour.” He set the document down. “I want to be precise about what I’m saying. I’m not raising this as a constraint. I’m raising it because the board should understand that we are no longer deliberating in a vacuum. The market has already priced this in. Whatever we decide in this room, the decision has weight it would not have had before that announcement went live.”

Whitlock nodded. “I understand that.”

“Do we have a timeline from his side?”

“He said seventy-two hours for a formal response. He was not concerned about the answer.”

Hale looked up. “He wasn’t concerned.”

“No.”

A board member who hadn’t spoken yet, Paul Jennings, put his copy down on the table with a flat sound. “James. Before we get into the formal motion. I want to ask you something directly.” He looked at Whitlock steadily. “When you were in that room with him this morning — do you believe this company is what the announcements say it is?”

The question sat in the air.

Whitlock didn’t answer immediately. He thought about the office this morning. The way Liam had appeared, already seated, before Whitlock had registered the movement. The woman who had walked in without apology and sat beside him. What Liam had said about her, and what she had said herself, in two sentences, without elaboration.

“Yes,” Whitlock said. “I believe it completely.”

Jennings held his gaze for a moment. Then he nodded once and picked his copy back up.

Reeves looked around the table. “Do we need to go to a formal vote or does the room have a consensus?”

Nobody spoke against it.

“Then we’re agreed,” Whitlock said. “I’ll contact the CEO within the hour to confirm. Legal begins drafting the framework today. Communications prepares a statement for when we’re ready to go public with the name. We also have a lot of work to do with regulators.”

He looked around the table one more time.

“This is the most significant partnership in the history of this institution,” he said. “I want everyone in this room to understand that before we leave it.”

Nobody disagreed.

The meeting ended sixteen minutes after it had begun.