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21. JP Morgan Chase

• Head of IT: Mark Kimber, iCTO & EMEA CTO for the Global Investment Bank and Simon Cooper, CTO Core Processing
• Industry: Financial services
• Website: www.jpmorganchase.com

JP Morgan is an international bank heralding from the US. It provides wholesale banking services to clients including corporations, financial institutions, sovereign wealth and hedge funds. In the US, Chase - its consumer facing retail bank - provides checking accounts, credit card and mortgage services, among many other things.

IT Leader: Mark Kimber, iCTO for the global investment bank and Simon Cooper, CTO for Core Processing globally.
“One of the things I like about the organisation is that it’s very team oriented, so we are two of a wider technology team and it’s a very supportive relationship. Simon Cooper is responsible for the processing platforms that are the engine room of the investment bank and I deal with our infrastructure and production environment,” says Mark Kimber of the double act.

“My role is two-fold - investing in the technology to make the bank work more efficiently ensuring the technology fits within the business, and to provide support to the CAO,” says Simon Cooper

Reporting line: Both report to the Chief Administration Officer for the investment bank and the Head of Markets Strategies who report to the CEO

Board level seat: No, but the considerable size of JP Morgan means that there are a number of different leadership teams and both IT leaders sit on these

IT budget:  Has been reported as approx. $2bn annually, although not officially disclosed

IT estate and or number of log on accounts under the control of the IT leader: JP Morgan’s investment bank, is a 25,000 person organisation. It is a highly technology centric organisation and the CEO, Jes Staley, has long declared that JP Morgan is a technology business at heart.

As part of his role, Simon Cooper is on the management team for JP Morgan’s Bournemouth operation that employs 4500 people and is the county’s largest employer, an operation that he says is a particularly committed and stable workforce. London is naturally a more fluid employment market due to the competitive nature of the city.

Level of the workforce that relies on technology to carry out their tasks: 100 per cent

IT staff currently employed: 7000 technologists, which is bigger than some technology companies

IT management team and reporting structure:  Cooper and Kimber both have 11 direct reports, each across all the three regions that JP Morgan operates in

Primary technology suppliers: Not disclosed, but Kimber says he often likes to pair larger players with smaller firms to encourage innovative solutions.

Strategic aim of the CIO and IT operations for the next financial year: “As a technology organisation, we are midway through a transformational strategic re-engineering programme (SRP). So for me it’s about delivering on the SRP and continuing to look at every opportunity to manage our cost base effectively. We are also looking at how we foster innovation and respond effectively to market changes,” says Kimber of the programme to reduce the number of applications within its portfolio as a result of the bank’s mergers and acquisitions of late.

For Cooper, the priority is to move more to a service oriented architecture (SOA) and a central data strategy to remove replication. Again, and like all CIOs, he’s focused on “constantly driving technology costs down” mainly because the size of trades is decreasing but the number of trades is increasing.

Technologies considered by the leader to offer their organisation potential: Cloud, big data, compute capabilities and mobile/end-user solutions are among the many significant opportunities and there are areas of JP Morgan doing something across all.

How do you see technology transforming your organisation in the near future? “Delivery of Cloud and high performance computing with low latency mean that you can produce an effective set of solutions for the organisation,” Kimber says.

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