Bank or fintech? JPMorgan’s top technologists say the bank is better
If you’re looking for the best fintech jobs, you might not want to go work for a fintech. Not only are fintechs struggling to raise funding and firing people in the current financial environment, banks are like giant exciting fintechs right now anyway.
So said two of JPMorgan’s top technologists in a YouTube video quietly released in early August. While the JPM techs aren’t exactly impartial and the video is a slick affair with shimmering music, the two may have a point and are well placed to judge given that both were poached from seemingly more exciting tech roles and are now clearly keen to declare where exciting their JPMorgan jobs are.
The two speakers are Eisar Lipkovitz and Mike Blandina. Lipkovitz is the man JPMorgan hired from ride-sharing app Lyt to revolutionize technology at its investment bank when former CIB chief technology officer Mike Grimaldi joined hedge fund Balyasny as CIO. Before Lyft, Lipkovitz worked for Google on the technology behind videos, display, advertising and analytics. He probably could have chosen any tech job; he chose JPMorgan. Blandina runs global payments technology for JPM and is also a major banking neophyte, having worked for Bakkt, a digital asset payments technology platform, PayPal, Google and various other non-tradfi venues.
In between flashes, both men say that JPMorgan is great. JPMorgan offers all the challenges of Google, PayPal and Bakkt “on a large scale” on a “massive platform” and with a technology budget of $12 billion a year, says Blandina. It’s like working for every fintech combined, plus it doesn’t feel like you’re working hand-to-mouth on a venture capital firm budget. And while you may not be working entirely in greenfield technology, the engineering challenge of “replacing the wings of an airplane” mid-flight is a buzz in itself. While fintechs have a “few thousand customers”, JPMorgan already has 50 million customers.
Lipkovitz is equally excited. At JPMorgan, he says, “you can work in terms of the guts of how the financial system works versus scratching the surface and just focusing on the user experience,” he says. Sixteen months later, Lipkovitz says he is “very, very happy” to have joined the bank, where he works with the “latest technologies, the latest languages, the latest hardware,” to “completely rebuild, upgrade and modernize the platforms .”
At JPM, Lipkovitz says there’s cloud-based platforms, there’s microservices architecture, there’s even an internal blockchain. Features are shipped every two weeks using agile methods, and there are so many different opportunities that Lipkovitz says he’s met people on his team who have worked there for an “incredible” 35 years.
The implication is that these people would have moved to fintechs if they didn’t like their jobs at JPM. Maybe they had already been in a big bank for too long? While JPMorgan’s engineering function clearly has a lot going for it, the real test of its appeal may be whether Blandina is still around in two years. Over the past 11 years, he has had seven different employers and hasn’t been anywhere much longer than three years. He has already been at JPM for two years and three months…
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