There's a subtle shift underway at JPMorgan, and it shows how Amazon's influenced the Wall Street giant
- Business Insider recently sat down with Lori Beer, chief information officer at JPMorgan Chase. In that role, she oversees an annual tech spend of $10.8 billion and 50,000 technologists.
- We discussed JPMorgan's tech strategy and how JPMorgan's taking inspiration from Amazon.
- "Jeff Bezos has always looked at his company as being very customer-obsessed," Beer said. "We’re thinking of JPMorgan Chase in the same light."
It's evident when JPMorgan CFO Marianne Lake talks about the bank's opportunity to "delight" customers. Or when co-president Gordon Smith sends a memo to staff highlighting the bank's "customer obsession." CEO Jamie Dimon has even specifically referenced Amazon Prime.
That's right. It's clear that JPMorgan's taking inspiration from Amazon.
The US banking behemoth has a close relationship with Amazon, partnering with the company on healthcare along with Berkshire Hathaway. It's also reportedly held talks with Amazon over a partnership around a checking account-type product. It's a user of Amazon Web Services. But the relationship goes further.
There's a subtle shift in mindset across JPMorgan's businesses, and it closely reflects Amazon's own approach, both to customers and to tech.
"We’re transitioning from meeting the needs of our customers to anticipating their needs," Lori Beer, chief information officer at JPMorgan Chase, told Business Insider.
In her role, Beer oversees an annual tech spend of $10.8 billion and 50,000 technologists. And she's playing a key role in the shift that's taking place at JPMorgan.
It could mean opening an API store, giving JPMorgan's markets clients access to the bank's data, analytics and execution tools. Or working with fintech startups. Or experimenting with Finn, an all digital bank that's being trialed in St. Louis and is built using the same technology that powers the Chase mobile platform.
Business Insider recently sat down with Beer to talk about the bank's tech strategy, Amazon, and experimenting with new products. The following is a lightly edited transcript of the conversation:
Matt Turner: Jamie Dimon recently talked about giving away some things for free as part of a profitable customer relationship, and he cited the Amazon Prime model. What's changed in how you think about the customer relationship?
Lori Beer: What we talk about on the retail side is the Chase customer model. If you think about products, traditionally, we looked very vertically, whether it's a credit card or auto loan. But we're now in 61 million households, almost one in two. The ability to take what we know about a consumer and apply that, knowledge, and insight to how we manage the overall relationship is very powerful.
Turner: To what extent is Amazon an inspiration, then?
Beer: When we talk about becoming a digital bank, we actually say, "Powered by a leading technology company." Being a leading technology company is one of our firm-wide priorities. When I was named as the Global CIO, I was also named to the Operating Committee. That's the first time the CIO has actually been on the Operating Committee. I think it's really important from the perspective of how many things are going on and how much technology is being leveraged across the firm.
Jeff Bezos has always looked at his company as being very customer-obsessed. We’re thinking of JPMorgan Chase in the same light. We’re transitioning from meeting the needs of our customers to anticipating their needs. How do you anticipate their unmet needs? How do you anticipate where they might need you in the future? How that translates for us into technology, is that companies like Amazon are really good at thinking about how they're building out their platforms. Amazon envisioned how they could leverage technology for future business models.
Turner: What does that actually mean in terms of how you run the business?
Beer: I think for us, it's driving down into, how are we more thoughtful about platforms? How are we more thoughtful about the data and the connectedness of the information? Technology is different now. I went through those generational shifts where when you wanted to go from one system to another system, you had those big bang system migrations, and there was risk in that. With technology today, you can bring data together. You can bring unstructured data more effectively together and you can do it with speed. It's all these things that are helping enable machine learning, too, as we go down that path. We’re not only being thoughtful about being customer-obsessed, but also, think through the design of the platforms and how customers might use those platforms, and how they need to work together.
Turner: It strikes me that what you're describing is a pretty significant shift beyond the traditional product mindset you tend to see in finance.
Beer: We have a product mindset that includes designing from a customer experience mindset. We'll do consumer testing, where we actually bring customers into our facilities and test products and technology, almost live, and review how these functions might play out and how customers react. We’re moving to a much more agile development environment, something we learned from tech companies. We’ve shifted from releasing software every few months down to every few weeks for some of our newer products.
Turner: What you're doing with Finn sounds a little like what you're describing.
Beer: If you think about how we created Finn, we used the power of technology at the firm. We started by thinking about, 'How do we leverage the great platforms we've built?’ We were able to build Finn using the same technology that powers the Chase mobile platform. The pace and speed to market that enables is a significant advantage for us. We can test new user interface designs, test new products, see how they’re adopted and then bring that feedback into our Chase Mobile platform.
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Sunday, April 22, 2018
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