Banks have inherent advantages over fintechs in the race to recruit top tech talent although fintechs are often viewed as more efficient and faster-moving than banks.

“Technologists have highly valued skills and the competition to attract them is fierce across all industries,” Gill Haus, chief information officer, Chase at $3.7 trillion JPMorgan Chase, told Bank Automation News.

Nearly 180,000 new technology jobs will be created this year, with tech employing a total of 8.9 million people in the U.S. — about a 2% increase from 2021, according to IT certification and training company CompTIA.

Banks, financial institutions and fintechs must first convince technology workers to go into financial services, Haus said. Software engineers at Chase can “use their skills to solve some of the world’s most complex problems, including how to make it easier and faster for people to manage their money,” he noted.

Technology is at or near the top of most banks’ organizational priorities, said Haus, former senior director of product development at PayPal. JPMorgan Chase invests more than $12 billion annually in technology with $4 billion of that budget dedicated to Chase , which employs about 12,000 technologists, he said.

At Chase, the new digital banking landscape has deepened interactions between the bank’s product, design and technology teams, making technologists’ jobs more collaborative.

Haus pointed to three advantages banks have over fintechs when it comes to hiring technology talent:

1. Longer reach, more established. Chase has some 60.2 million users across its digital banking services and uses the latest automation technologies such as machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud at scale, he said. “There are few fintechs that can say that their solutions help more than 60 million households with their finances.”
2. Greater impact. Technologists can have real impact on customers’ lives at a bank, Haus said. “Chase technologists have a front-row seat to build the next big thing in fintech to help our customers make the most of their money.”
3. Driving change. There’s much tech work to be done at banks and financial institutions, he noted. Chase technologists are now driving “a complete reorganization of our processes to be more customer- and product-centric.”

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