JPMorgan Chase, with a sizable team of technologists in India is building and developing platforms and services, which are globally adopted. It is also actively engaging with fintech startups in India to forge collaborations, said senior executives of the company.
Globally, the company has an employee base of 3,00,000, 63,000 of which are tech employees. One third of this technology workforce is based in India across Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
“The importance of technology and what technology does to enable the business, is a given. Hence it is a huge opportunity for us and the work we do here reflects the value and impact. We have people working on cutting edge technology and building the best platforms and technology for our clients and becoming huge enablers,” Vibhavari Jahagirdar, Head of Global Technology for India and Global Co-Head of Post Trade Technology, JPMorgan Chase told businessline.
The team in India has built - Assistant, an application used internally, a product that improves employee productivity by eliminating manual steps in common daily tasks. It has also built Story, a commercial real estate management platform which aims to help commercial property owners and landlords. These are also globally applicable. “These are just a couple of examples to that effect, there is a lot more that we do. Even if it is not the entire product in some cases, we are still delivering, as the platform gets bigger, sometimes the pieces get bigger as well,” Jahagirdar adds.
JPMorgan Chase is also actively engaging with fintech startups in India through its flagship event Tech Innovation Forum. It is looking at startups in the areas of Artificial Intelligence(AI)/Machine Learning(ML), Core Engineering, Payments and Cybersecurity, which are core to the company’s business.
Suresh Shetty, CTO, Onyx at J.P. Morgan explains that the idea behind the program is to get exposure to newer ideas. “We need to identify areas where individuals are thinking in terms that align with our own, since this could inspire fresh ideas. The objective is to collaborate with these companies to see what types of services they may have that could be implemented, in terms of implementing their services, utilising your services in some manner,” he said.
In the first edition of the forum, last year, the company interacted with 40 companies and is looking to engage with more startups in this years’ edition. JPMorgan Chase is also open to fund, partner and develop common solutions with the startups, provided they strategically align with company requirements.