jp morgan: JP Morgan is looking at collaboration in fintech space in India, says global CIO Lori Beer

JP Morgan is keeping a close eye on the fintech innovation coming out of India and sees the “incredible surge of innovation happening in the country” as a huge opportunity to collaborate across the entire ecosystem, Lori Beer, global chief information officer at JPMorgan Chase & Co, said.

“We have a team that engages with the entire technology ecosystem,” Beer told ET in an exclusive interview during her visit to India earlier this month. “We’re also monitoring the trends and seeing the incredible increase in innovation happening here,” she said of India.

Beer manages nearly $14 billion in technology spending for the $121 billion financial services firm, which is also the largest bank in North America by total assets.

“It is a great opportunity; with such a large talent base, our ability for the teams to come together or even innovate across that ecosystem … is something we’re definitely looking forward to,” she said when asked about innovations in digital public goods such as the Unified Payments Interface (UPI). ) and account aggregator system among others. “We do a lot of work in Silicon Valley and Israel…(and) monitor what’s happening in the (Indian) ecosystem and decide when we want to bring in a particular company, do a proof of concept…,” said Beer .

She also said that JP Morgan’s over 19,000 technical engineers in India across its technology centers in Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Mumbai are critical to the bank’s operations and innovation. India houses a third of its total technologists globally.

However, Beer said the bank’s annual technology budgets for 2023 will be in a “flatish” range of $14 billion compared to last year, as inflationary pressures or geopolitical issues loom, but the organization is “well-positioned to cycle through economic cycles”.

“We’re seeing volatility in markets and the business environment, with some companies revising their budgets and laying off large chunks of staff. But as we move through the cycle, things like this will change,” she said.

Beer said it is difficult to predict what the outcome will be “because there are so many different variables, but we feel well positioned as a company to navigate through it and will continue to invest in our business, our people and our technology” .

US-based banks are top customers for most Indian IT companies, and banking, finance and insurance (BFSI) customers accounted for nearly 30% of Indian IT’s total revenue of $227 billion in FY22, making up the largest vertical.

As JP Morgan looks to optimize infrastructure and use tools such as boosting productivity to weather the uncertainty, Beer said it will continue to hire and replace engineers who leave as part of attrition.

She said the company is “very focused” on inventing in the blockchain space. It created a permissioned blockchain network called Liink to validate customer information and comply with anti-money laundering rules. Liink had 35 million messages moved through the network last year. It also has JPM Coin which is for wholesale users. It is to help with cross-border and last-mile payments. It is a deposit account system built on blockchain technology.

The New York-headquartered lender said it is open to partnering, acquiring and investing in fintech companies as around 50% of US households want to shift more from traditional banking to engage in connected commerce.

The company had acquired Pune-based travel loyalty company Tavisca in July 2021 for an undisclosed sum. The platform was integrated with JP Morgan’s portal and provides exclusive benefits for travel bookings made through the portal.

Innovations happening in India are also being scaled globally, Beer said.

For example, the company’s commercial property management platform Story, which aims to help commercial property owners and landlords, was built entirely by India-based engineers, she said. Its digital assistant was uniquely created by a team entirely in India. The digital assistant can be integrated with Zoom and Office 365.

“In the US, one of the biggest users of checks is still people paying rent… Story provides streamlined online rent management, portfolio management, market analysis, tenant screening and, of course, bank security,” Beer said.

“A few hundred applications that are owned directly from India, where the application owner sits here and their product teams are here. That’s something we continue to look at to optimize our talent pool,” she said.

Beer said all industries at JP Morgan are represented at its technology centers in India. “We also have the teams building products for the entire company based in India; we built over 300 products,” she said. “Their work ranges from migrating to the public cloud to building the developer tool chain, building out core features and integrating them with the big the public cloud service providers, among others.”

New technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are other major areas of focus, she added.