As global CIO of JPMorgan Chase, Lori Beer oversees a massive IT operation larger than most companies, involving a team of 63,000 people worldwide and an annual budget of $17 billion (at last count), roughly 10% of JPMorgan's total revenue last year. The bank moves $10 trillion (that's 10 with 12 zeros after it) every day, and is the largest bank in the U.S. by deposits and online customers.
It's a massive undertaking that requires extensive cloud infrastructure services, on-premise data centres, mobile infrastructure and a range of other digital technologies just to run the bank's trading operations – not to mention the rest of the business – and requires people with meticulous attention to detail to keep it running smoothly, securely and efficiently.
“If you think about just our marketplace business, it's all technology-driven, high-speed, real-time processing where seconds matter,” she said.
This requires significant capital; you need to build front-end services for customers and back-end services for the company. You need on-premise data centres and cloud services. You need innovative start-ups and established companies you can trust. You need an operational budget to run now and an innovation budget to look to the future.
This is a case study for all CIOs: Most CIOs will never approach the scale of JPMorgan Chase, but they can still learn from how the company does business.
Tracking the Big Tech Ecosystem
“We move $10 trillion a day and that business is growing, so there's a direct correlation to our technology investments, our products and services and our technology. So in addition to the normal business growth, there's the continuous optimization of how we use our infrastructure and things like that,” Beer told TechCrunch.
Naturally, the company is exploring how to leverage AI to manage all of this and deliver a better customer experience, adding a new layer of complexity to the mix that every CIO is currently grappling with.
“And then, of course, there are new technologies. AI, as you know, as you wrote, is amazing and brings a whole new dimension to volume-driven compute-related costs. We're focused on that,” she said.
In some ways, her speaking style is similar to that of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who, during his time in charge of Amazon Web Services, had an encyclopedic knowledge of the company's vast array of products and services and would talk about them in detail as if they were on a screen in front of him. Bea is similar, easily talking about her company's incredibly complex technology ecosystem and listing all the different areas that need to be tracked and kept an eye on.
That's a key aspect of her role: understanding the interconnectedness of different parts of the IT budget and how each part impacts the others as they build and maintain the bank's vast technology stack.
“You can't really talk about AI if you're not on the cloud, if you're not modernizing your data, if you haven't done all the foundational work,” she said. This has led the bank to embark on an aggressive modernization journey based on a hybrid strategy: Some of its more critical services run on-premise in highly sophisticated data centres the bank built to cater to its unique demands, and some in the clouds of the major cloud vendors: Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
And she ensured JPMorgan was AI-ready several years before generative AI became mainstream, preparing its in-house data house to handle large-scale language models. “We developed our AI data strategy and our AI strategy more than three years ago,” she says, which entailed forming a steering committee to align our data strategy with our cloud strategy, because the most advanced data management capabilities are in the cloud. “So we were at the forefront of AI,” she says.
Building resilient systems
With such a vast IT infrastructure, it's more important than ever to have a control system in place to manage it all. This requires a framework and a way to interface with all the services your company provides.
“First of all, we need to think in terms of what is the resiliency standard that we have to provide — what are the essential services? If you have applications or workloads that are not essential services, then it's going to be a lot easier to move them to the cloud, right? [level] “In terms of resiliency, I would say probably is we run these things in very efficient, very effective, highly secured data centers,” she said.
That means working with engineers, developers and IT professionals to understand how the company works and adhere to a clearly defined set of standards. “I continue to coach my teams to understand, teaching our engineers how to be responsible for the cost, security, scalability and efficiency of how we build software and leverage infrastructure, whether that's on-premise or in the cloud.”
The company also partners with numerous startups to leverage their innovations. Beer has assembled a team dedicated to finding the next big thing. “And the reason that's important is because we're so large, we're so big, and we're so scaled. Their job is to always be on the lookout for new companies and how they evolve. So at any given time, we probably have around 200 POCs.” [proofs of concept] “It's ongoing. We continue to test and learn, and we're in a position to do the best we can, whether it's cyber technology or other technology,” she said.
For Beer, every decision must come with a timeline to measure value. More urgent projects have a one- to three-year timeline, while longer-term projects have a three- to five-year time horizon. This could include blockchain, AI or even quantum computing, and the company wants every advantage in terms of the services it provides and the efficiencies it can gain.
“We have to invest in the next horizon — things that add value, things where the value is uncertain. But we have to always look forward and try to balance our investments across all of that.”
