Fintech
JPMorgan’s new ex-fintech CTO suggests payments are more important than artificial intelligence
JP Morgan has a new incoming CTO in the form of former PayPal CTO Shri Shivananda. Going for a fintech executive (albeit a more historic name in the industry) is an interesting move, but how much of that fintech DNA will Shivananda be able to transfer to the bank?
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Shivananda is one of many PayPal alumni at JPMorgan. We have identified at least 320 people who work at the bank and who previously worked for the payments company. At least 34 of these are chief executive officers (MDs), so there is a strong PayPal contingent in JPMorgan’s leadership core. Goldman Sachs, for reference, has a CTO from Verizon and a CIO from AWS; we can see only 167 alumni of both companies in the bank and only five MDs.
JPMorgan MD colleagues coming from PayPal recently include the head of data delivery, Sudhir Rao who joined in November. The longest-serving former PayPal CEO at JPMorgan is payments architecture head Jack Gibson, who joined as executive director in 2016 and was named CEO in 2022.
What makes ex-PayPal talent so popular? When Goldman Sachs appointed the AWS alumnus Marco Argenti as CIO in 2019, it made sense as Goldman was engaged in a mass migration to the cloud and was using AWS across the bank. JPMorgan naming Shivananda may, therefore, suggest that the bank’s payment offerings are of paramount importance at this time. Most of JPMorgan’s PayPal CEOs work in payments or at its consumer digital banking offering, Chase, of which the bank is investing heavily in.
The hot topic in tech among JPMorgan executives, however, is TO THE. Reviews on the Blind job board suggest that PayPal’s work in this space isn’t exactly industry-leading. It is said of his efforts machine learning they are “just a show…when you dig deep, they had almost no impact.” One machine learning engineer calls the management “terrible” and another says “there is no innovation.” The bank, however, recently hired Amazon’s Manoj Sindhwani as its CIO for data and AI.
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