Jamie Dimon’s Annual Letter To JPMorgan Chase Shareholders Talks Technology

OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FINTECH SNARK TANK

In JPMorgan Chase’s new earnings contact, the $3.76 trillion (in property) bank declared it programs to increase its annual technological innovation spending plan to $12 billion, 26% extra than it put in in 2020. According to Tearsheet:

“Analysts experienced a difficult time accepting the massive boost in tech spending. The enhanced tech spending plan pushes complete predicted expense progress to 8%, which could induce the organization to miss profitability targets this year and potentially in 2023.”

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Responding to phone calls for estimates of the return on the bank’s technology investments, CEO Jamie Dimon claimed:

“A whole lot of you want payback tomorrow and stuff like that. We’ll not disclose all those quantities, but we are there for the long run. We’re likely to add products and solutions and products and services and nations for the relaxation of our life. So I doubt, over the very long operate, we’ll fail.”

Dimon may well have said that Chase won’t disclose the payback quantities but his new letter to stockholders in the bank’s 2021 once-a-year report presents insights into wherever the $12 billion technology investment decision is going—and what he expects to get back from it.

Beneath are rates from the letter and the Fintech Snark Tank’s acquire on them.

Technology Infrastructure

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“Some of these investments [in technology] basically ought to be carried out to sustain the company’s overall health. Investments in this bucket support hold the ship in idea-best form and touch a wide variety of workplace requires: regulatory necessities and essential improvements for cybersecurity, as well as operational resiliency and security. Some matters we have completed with no direct revenue benefit, instead only to keep our aggressive placement. I contact these table stakes—think of digital account opening for buyer and compact business accounts.”

Fintech Snark Tank take: As Dimon notes, infrastructure investments often have no direct earnings benefit. Much more vital, even so, is that these investments generally never have a charge reduction benefit, either.

This is in which quite a few banking institutions waste their time and deceive themselves—they require IT to get ready ROI analyses for infrastructure investments with price reduction estimates that just about never come to fruition.

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This is significantly legitimate with digital account opening, which Dimon refers to as “table stakes.” Many financial institutions continue to function under the delusion that offering digital account opening will noticeably (or at the very least, meaningfully) improve account volume. It does not. Many thanks for calling this out, Mr. Dimon.

Maintenance & Enhancement

“Other investments are certain improvements to products and solutions and products and services, normally with identifiable advantages. Just about all of the $2 billion in charges are analyzed and studied for their ROI or other significant rewards. Often persons refer to these costs as modernizing or adopting new systems. The phrase indicates that once you get to a fashionable platform, these expenses need to considerably decrease—which is rarely the case. In truth, when we assess these charges, we integrate not only the price to build the products or provider but also the cost to retain it likely ahead.”

Fintech Snark Tank just take: I often surprise how lots of bank CFOs however really don’t grasp this principle, that the progress of new methods and programs calls for ongoing servicing which effects in more bills for IT.

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But what Dimon dances about here is that investments in modern day platforms should really significantly cut down expenses—in the departments and strains of business that the platforms effects, not in IT.

Cloud-Based Systems

“On the path to new and fashionable infrastructure, cloud-based programs will ultimately be more quickly, more cost-effective, extra versatile and also AI-enabled. We have put in $2.2 billion developing new, cloud-centered details facilities. Our whole expensed expense of data facilities is better than in previous decades because of the duplicative expenditure that is generated as we operate both the new and older centers.

Thousands of purposes (and their linked databases) are becoming replatformed and refactored to operate in the non-public and general public cloud natural environment. We migrated our card mainframe to the new info centre and are now looking at close to 20% more rapidly reaction times for our big shopper-going through apps. This just one application will use only 1.5% of the ability of our new information facilities: Of our additional than 5,000 purposes that will continue to be in use in two yrs, 40% will have been replatformed.”

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Fintech Snark Tank take: A lot more good depth about the place the $12 billion in tech is going—and the gain it’s producing. Almost as an afterthought, Dimon outlined that the investments in the cloud involve items like “modernizing developer tools and embedding operational resiliency and cybersecurity controls.” Dimon is underplaying the affect here—resiliency is fantastic, but improved speed and agility is the serious benefit.

Decentralized Finance (DeFi) and Blockchain

“Decentralized finance and blockchain are real, new technologies that can be deployed in both of those public and personal trend, permissioned or not. We use a blockchain community known as Liink to allow banks to share intricate info, and we also use a blockchain to go tokenized US greenback deposits with JPM Coin. We believe there are several makes use of wherever a blockchain can exchange or make improvements to contracts, knowledge ownership and other enhancements for some reasons, however, it is now too high-priced or way too slow to be deployed.”

Fintech Snark Tank take: The press is likely to have a subject day with Dimon’s quotation that “DeFi and blockchain are real” soon after his comment “I do not treatment about bitcoin. I have no fascination in it.” The dilemma, of study course, is that that statement does not conflict with his once-a-year report statement.

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Embedded Banking

“We carry on to convey to the current market and commercialize ground breaking products, such as embedded banking AI-pushed fraud controls and forecasting and account validation and programmable payments on JPM Coin.”

Fintech Snark Tank get: This offhand point out of embedded banking required much more rationalization. Does Chase strategy to provide a banking as a support (BaaS) presenting to fintechs and non-fiscal models?

While conventional knowledge retains that Durbin-shielded banks are the very best candidates to be spouse financial institutions because of interchange revenue sharing agreements, I’ve by no means believed that will preserve out larger banks like Chase.

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Supplying to take a reduced share of interchange is basically a enterprise design choice for the larger banks, and the prospect to diversify revenue streams will show to be just as appealing to massive banking companies as it is to smaller sized establishments. This need to be extremely pleasing to many banking companies as the price tag of shopper acquisition is drastically reduced considering the fact that the bank’s partner is, efficiently, having to pay the acquisition fees.

APIs

“We have made in excess of 1,000 application programming interfaces that give a variety of styles of buyers access to our systems in a managed way, permitting them to automate our banking systems into their enterprise devices.”

Fintech Snark Tank acquire: It might have been also significantly element for the yearly report, but it would be intriguing to know what share of these APIs are private APIs versus those that are associate or open up APIs.

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Private APIs are predominantly for internal integration—i.e., price containment and efficiency improvement purposes—while the development of spouse and open up APIs could deliver some insight into Chase’s long run products and services plans.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

“We are investing additional revenue (feel hundreds of hundreds of thousands of dollars) just about every year on AI. For case in point, we use AI to deliver insights on current and prospective shoppers from general public info, these kinds of as KYC protocols, regulatory filings, social media, information, public web sites and files. When standardized, the information is then applied to various makes use of, these kinds of as generating sales opportunities, determining firms and traders, onboarding clientele, and detecting ESG themes. In all of these situations, there are identifiable returns owing to reduced prospecting costs or improved companies.”

Fintech Snark Tank take: It’s intriguing that, whilst a great deal of the market talks about the upcoming potential for AI to supply much better advice to retail prospects, Dimon’s examples of AI deployment inside of Chase are extra business-centered.

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Addressing the Tech Investing Critics

Critics attacked Dimon for not becoming more clear about the place Chase’s $12 billion tech investment is going—and what it will get from it. Dimon’s letter to Chase shareholders addresses these critiques head on. As Dimon wrote:

“While we evaluate each of these incremental investments (and there are hundreds of them) as diligently as we can, you can assess the over-all final results by inquiring the following inquiries:

• Do we maintain the competitiveness of our solutions?
• Are we gaining industry share?
• Do we have genuine wins in opposition to some hard rivals, both equally in the banking earth and in fintech companies?
• What are our purchaser satisfaction scores?
• Have we created new products that may well not create income but clearly have enhanced our enterprise?
• How are our solutions serving our clients’ requires to obtain our devices how and when they want?

Last but not least, also contemplate: Is the lender sustaining its general competitive situation, escalating at tempo and even now retaining a really healthful return on tangible typical fairness though investing for the upcoming?”

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Fintech Snark Tank take: Every single lender CEO should really be wondering about know-how the way Dimon does. As it is every 12 months, Dimon’s letter to shareholder is a ought to go through. I do would like he experienced talked about bitcoin and cryptocurrency, though.