Lori Beer, JPMorgan Chase’s global CIO, oversees a massive IT operation that’s bigger than many companies. It involves a team of 63,000 people worldwide and an annual budget of $17 billion (at last count), which was about 10% of JPMorgan’s overall revenue last year. It moves $10 trillion (that’s a 10 followed by 12 zeros) every day and is the largest U.S. bank in terms of deposits and online customers.
This is a massive undertaking that involves massive cloud infrastructure services, on-premises data centers, mobile infrastructure, and other various digital technologies just to handle the transaction side of banking, let alone the rest of the business. It requires someone with a keen eye for detail to ensure everything runs smoothly, securely, and efficiently.
“If you think just about our marketplace business, the high-speed, real-time processing of these types of things where fractions of a second matter, that’s all technology-driven,” she said.
It requires huge amounts of money and requires building front-end services for customers and back-end services for the business. It requires on-premises data centers and cloud services. It requires innovative startups and reliable, established businesses. It requires an operating budget to operate in the present and an innovation budget that anticipates the future.
It’s a case study for all CIOs, most of whom will never reach the stature of JPMorgan Chase but who can nevertheless learn from how it runs its business.
Monitoring a huge technological ecosystem
“We manage $10 trillion a day and we’ve seen growth in that space. So there’s a direct correlation to our technology investments, our products and services, our technology. So there’s just the normal growth of the business, and then there’s the continued optimization of how we use infrastructure and things like that,” Beer told TechCrunch.
Unsurprisingly, the company is exploring how AI can help manage all of this and deliver a better customer experience, adding another layer of complexity that every CIO faces these days.
“Then, of course, there are new technologies. I mean, AI – as you well know, you talked about it – is great and brings a whole set of new costs related to volume and compute, and we’re relying heavily on that,” she said.
When she speaks, she resembles in some ways Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. When he was at the helm of Amazon Web Services, he had an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the company’s many products and services, and would talk about them in great detail as if he had a screen in front of him with the information. Beer is the same way, speaking with ease about her company’s extremely complex technology ecosystem, listing all the different areas she needs to track and know.
This is an important aspect of her role: understanding the interdependencies of all the different parts of her IT budget and how each affects the others as she builds and maintains the bank’s vast technology stack.
“You can’t really start talking about AI unless you’re in the cloud, unless you’re modernizing your data, unless you’re doing all the groundwork,” she said. So the bank has embarked on an aggressive modernization journey based on a hybrid strategy. Some of the most critical services run on-premises in highly sophisticated data centers that the company built to meet its unique needs, and some run in the cloud with the major cloud providers: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
She did indeed ensure that JPMorgan was well-prepared for generative AI years before it became a reality, ensuring the company had its data in order to work with large language models. “Over three years ago, we defined an AI data strategy and an AI strategy,” she said. That involved forming an operational committee to align the data strategy and the cloud strategy, in part because the most advanced data management capabilities are in the cloud. “So we got a little bit ahead of that train,” she said.
Building resilient systems
When you have such a large IT infrastructure, it’s more important than ever to have control systems in place to help you manage it. This requires a framework and a way of working with every service the business provides.
“First of all, we have to think about it in the context of: what is the standard of resilience, the critical service, that I need to provide. In some cases, if I have an application or a workload that is not a critical service, it’s much easier to move to the cloud, right? If I have something that requires the highest [level] “When it comes to resiliency, maybe I can run these things in my highly effective, highly efficient, highly protected data centers,” she said.
That means working with engineers, developers, and IT professionals to help them understand how the business works and adhere to a clearly defined set of standards. “We continue to educate our teams to understand, whether it’s on-premises or in the cloud, teaching engineers how to be accountable for the cost, security, scalability, and efficiency of how we build software and operate infrastructure.”
The company also works with a number of startups to leverage their innovations; Beer has an entire team dedicated to finding the next big thing. “The reason it’s important is we’re so big, at such a size and scale, and their whole job is to constantly look at new businesses, how businesses are evolving, and so at any given time we probably have about 200 POCs.” [proofs of concept] “We continue to test and learn and we are able to do the best we can, whether it’s cyber technology or something else,” she said.
For Beer, every decision must be made within a specific time frame. The most immediate projects have a one- to three-year horizon, while projects that require more time to prepare have a three- to five-year horizon. This could include things like blockchain, AI, and even quantum computing, as the company looks for every possible advantage in terms of services provided and efficiency.
“We also have to invest in the next horizon, in things that add value, things where the value may be uncertain, but we have to continue to look to the future, and we really try to balance our investments between those things.”
