Chief executives at the country’s three biggest banks are sounding bullish on banking this coming year despite a looming threat of recession that some of them helped prognosticate.

Throughout presentations and Q&As at the Goldman Sachs U.S. Financial Services Conference in New York on Tuesday, CEO after CEO said they don’t see a lot to be concerned about, at least for now. Until the optimism fades and it’s time to clamp down, it appears tech spend is generally on its way up.

Wells Fargo
Tim Sloan, CEO of Wells Fargo, said while the bank is focused on reducing expenses, it’s also increasingly investing in technology. This includes spending on digital self-service capabilities, regulatory and governance requirements, safety and soundness, innovation, IT simplification, business support and growth and data management, he said.

“We expect total technology expense to increase by 10% this year, spending a total of approximately $9 billion, which includes approximately $800 million specifically for cybersecurity,” he said. “We believe the investments we are making today to modernize data and to accelerate the pace of innovation will lower cost in the future, while protecting our customers’ information and improving the customer experience, which will enable us to grow and build more long-term relationships.”

In October, Sloan said, 28% of all Wells Fargo’s retail mortgage applications were done through its new online mortgage tool. The bank has also launched Control Tower, which provides customers more control over their accounts, and, in select markets, a pilot for Greenhouse, which is a new standalone mobile banking app with money management tools.

Sloan also said Wells Fargo Gateway, an API platform that integrates the bank’s services with partner platforms, now has ten times the traffic it had at the start of the year.

JPMorgan Chase
Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said the bank isn’t being run by guessing what’s going to happen with the economy in 2019, and there’s no guarantee that a downturn will come next year or even in 2020.

Chase is spending about $11 billion on technology this year, or about 10% of revenues, with about half that spending going to new technology, platforms or data, and the rest going toward maintenance of existing systems.

“The stuff you need is automating things, is straight through processing, and as you invest, it’s Chase Pay, it’s better products and services,” Dimon said. “You have to do that.”

He said costs of running the bank can be driven down over the course of time through better computers, agile manufacturing, as well as internal cloud, public cloud and private cloud. But it costs money to develop and implement new technology, which is something of a constant.

“You should expect the tech budget to kind of go up over time, hopefully less than revenues, but go up over time,” Dimon said.

He said Chase’s technology team is asked if it’s building all the things it needs rather than being provided a budget of, say $1 billion, and having it capped off there.

“We say, ‘Are you building the things you need to compete and win in the future?’” Dimon said. “And, of course, we analyze everybody else, too, and every now and then the people doing a better job in that, in certain areas, makes us jealous. We want to do a better job.”

He pointed out that the big banks just spent a lot of money building P2P platform Zelle, which he considered “table stakes,” or the bare minimum.

“You got to digitize certain stuff and don’t spend a lot of time thinking about what the payback is,” he said. “Because, if you don’t do it, you will lose a lot of business over time.”

Bank of America
Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, said everyone is predicting a slowdown next year and questions are understandably bubbling up, but that what we’re seeing right now is “very solid.”

Technology spending at BofA has reached nearly 10% of revenues today, up from about 5% a few years ago. The bank is spending about $3 billion on technology initiatives that Moynihan said “we feel good about,” although he also said he expects tech spending to flatten out over the next few years.

But, even as that overall number levels out, Moynihan also said there could be a 20% pickup in efficiency-delivering technology that could provide a boost to new initiatives.

“So, you’d say, ‘Oh, you’re not spending more,’ but that’s $3 billion, new,” he said. “These are initiatives. This isn’t running the platform. That’s another $10 billion to $11 billion that’s sitting out over here. This is just pure, new code going in, a million-plus lines every week.”