Due to rising interest rates that allowed the bank to charge clients more for loans, JPMorgan Chase & Co. reported a 52 percent increase in first-quarter profits.

After Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank failed last month, the banking giant saw a noticeable increase in deposits as clients and business rushed to it.

There don't seem to be many indications of potential banking system instability, at least among the biggest, most sophisticated financial firms in the country, following Friday's positive reports from JPMorgan, Citigroup, and Wells Fargo.

“These were the most watched bank earnings announcements in over a decade, with market participants scouring the results looking for signs of cracks in the US banking sector. Those analysts looking for signs of the banking crisis were greatly relieved to not find any,” said Octavio Marenzi, CEO of the consulting firm Opimas LLC, in an email.

JPMorgan, the nation’s biggest bank by assets posted a profit of $12.62bn, compared with a profit of $8.28bn in the same period a year earlier. On a per-share basis, the bank earned $4.10 a share, up from $2.63 a share a year ago, beating analysts’ expectations.

Most of the profit growth came from higher interest rates. The bank’s net interest income was $20.8bn in the quarter, up 49 percent from last year. Net interest income is a measure of the difference between what it pays depositors and what it charges for loans.

The largest US lender gained $50bn in deposits at the end of March, even as the rest of the industry saw a 3 percent decline in the first quarter.

Deposits at big banks had been falling for several quarters as consumers spent down their pandemic savings and businesses tapped into their stored cash to pay bills. But with the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March, businesses have been withdrawing their funds from smaller banks and moving them into the larger banks, which are considered “too big to fail” and have an implicit government backstop.

In a call with reporters, JPMorgan Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum said most of the new deposits flowed into new business and company bank accounts opened in the past month. The new deposits reversed the flow of deposits exiting the bank for several quarters.