The CIO managing a $17 billion budget and $10 trillion of transactions PER DAY

I just spotted a great article about JPMorgan’s CIO who manages a $17 billion budget (last time I looked, it was $11 billion). That sort of budget makes most fintechs look like small fry. Nevertheless, how much budget goes into innovation versus keeping the lights on? How much goes into development versus salaries? How much of the bank is employed in tech versus banking? Well, the answer to the latter question is that around one in four people working for JPMorgan Chase are technologists, engineers and developers. Here’s the low-down:

You could learn a lot from a CIO with a $17B IT budget

Lori Beer, global CIO at JPMorgan Chase, oversees a massive IT operation that’s bigger than many companies. It involves a 63,000-person team worldwide and a $17 billion yearly budget (at last count), which was about 10% of JPMorgan’s overall revenue last year. It’s moving $10 trillion (that’s a 10 with 12 zeros after it) every single day and is the largest U.S. bank in terms of deposits and online customers.

That’s serious scale involving massive cloud infrastructure services, on-prem data centres, mobile infrastructure, and other assorted digital technology just to run the transactions part of the bank, never mind the rest of the business. It requires a person with tremendous attention to detail to make sure it’s running smoothly, securely and efficiently.

“If you think about just our markets business, the high-speed, real-time processing of those types of things where fractions of seconds matter, that’s all technology driven,” she said.

It takes a huge amount of money and requires building front-end services for customers and back-end services for the company. It needs on-prem data centres and cloud services. It requires innovative startups and reliable, established companies. It demands an operating budget to run in the present and an innovation budget that looks forward to what’s coming.

It’s a case study for every CIO out there, most of whom will never come close to JPMorgan Chase’s scale but who can still learn from how it goes about its business.

“We move $10 trillion a day, and we’ve seen growth in that business. So there is a direct correlation to our tech investments, our products and services, our tech. So there’s just the normal business growth, and then there’s the continued optimization of how we use infrastructure and things like that,” Beer told TechCrunch.

Unsurprisingly, the company is looking at how AI can help manage all this and provide a better customer experience, adding another layer of complexity that every CIO is dealing with these days …

“You can’t really start talking about AI if you’re not in the cloud, if you’re not modernizing your data, if you’re not doing all the foundational stuff,” she said … and she actually made sure JPMorgan was well set up for generative AI several years before it burst into the mainstream, making sure the company had its data house in order so it could work with large language models. “It was over three years ago that we laid out an AI data strategy and AI strategy,” she said. That involved forming an operating committee to align the data strategy and cloud strategy in part because the most advanced data management capabilities are in the cloud. “So we sort of got a bit ahead of that train,” she said.

Meanwhile, is fintech a threat to the bank? Not really as they have a whole team dedicated to looking for the next big things.

“The reason that’s important is we’re so big, at such size and scale, and their whole job is to constantly look at new companies, the evolution of companies, and so at any point in time, we probably have like 200 POCs [proofs of concept] going on. We are continuing to test and learn and we’re in a position to be able to do best in breed, whether it’s cyber technology or something else,”

 

Read the full article here.