NEW YORK – Banking giant JPMorgan Chase is innovating its payments infrastructure with new tech amid a shifting regulatory landscape.
The $3.6 trillion bank is incorporating tech that can make operations simpler, efficient and cost effective, Sri Shivananda, chief information officer for payments at JPMorgan Payments, said during a panel at New York City Tech Week on June 4.
“We have a global footprint,” he said, adding that the large scale allows the bank to deploy tech quickly across operations but comes with the risks of not maintaining local compliance.
“Technology in the first generation of payments was all about getting it out and getting it running and making sure that it’s robust,” Shivananda said. “Now it’s about nimbleness, agility, adaptiveness and the [ability to give the] best experience that you can to the customer.”
These four trends — that are transforming the global payments landscape and JPMorgan —are at the heart of the strategy:
- Planet-scale architecture: While working with new tech, the bank aims to “deploy globally, comply locally and serve personally,” Shivananda said. This helps address the challenges of operating in complex, multi-jurisdictional environments.
- Digital ledgers: This includes tokenized payment systems from JPMorgan’s Kinexys platform, launched in 2020 as Onyx. Payments are becoming invisible for the end consumer, he said. “The underlying substrate has remained the same for about five decades.” Distributed ledger technology can help the bank make payments efficiently and quickly, he added.
- Resilient cryptography: The bank is investing heavily in resilient cryptography, framing it not just as a technical safeguard but a core enabler of its identity as a “business of trust,” Shivananda said.
Google Quantum AI researcher Craig Gidney published a research paper on May 21 with Cornell University, claiming that RSA encryption [encryption used by many crypto currencies like bitcoin] could be broken with 20 times fewer quantum resources than previously estimated, sending shockwaves through the industry.
“That’s an important trend I pay attention to,” he said.
- Widespread integration of AI: The tech is embedded across the company’s operations, with applications in both internal optimization and external customer experiences, guided by a strict commitment to ethics and regulatory compliance.
“The way I think of it is by two models: Where AI can assist in places and act in certain places,” he said, adding that managing risk is a popular use.
While developing tech, JPMorgan also pays attention to regtech, or the use of technology to streamline and improve compliance, amid a shifting regulatory landscape, Shivananda said.
“The way we need to build our systems is to make sure that it can meet whatever may be there, and in each jurisdiction,” he said.
