JPMorgan Chase boss Dimon hails ‘groundbreaking’ AI

In his annual letter to shareholders, Dimon says that the “importance of implementing new technologies simply cannot be overstated”.

Arguably the most important of these new technologies is AI, which is already being used by the banking giant for risk, prospecting, marketing, customer experience and fraud prevention, while also running throughout payments processing and money movement systems.

JPMorgan Chase currently has over 1000 people involved in data management, more than 900 data scientists – AI and machine learning experts who create new models – and 600 ML engineers. In addition, a 200-person AI research group is looking at the “hardest problems and new frontiers in finance”.

Writes Dimon: “We take the responsible use of AI very seriously and have an interdisciplinary team of ethicists helping us prevent unintended misuse, anticipate regulation, and promote trust with our clients, customers and communities. AI and data use is complex; it must be done following the laws of the land. But it is an absolute necessity that we do it both for the benefits I just described and, equally, for the protection of the company and the financial system – because you can be certain that the bad guys will be using it, too.”

Meanwhile, Dimon reveals that the bank has spent over $2 billion building cloud-based data centres and is working to modernise a significant portion of its applications to run in both our public and private cloud environments.

To date, about 38% of JPMorgan Chase’s applications have been migrated to the cloud, meaning over 50% of its application portfolio – including third-party, cloud-based applications – is running on modern environments.

“This journey to the cloud is hard work but necessary,” writes Dimon. “Unlocking the full potential of the cloud and nearly 550 petabytes of data will require replatforming (putting data in a cloud-eligible format) and refactoring (i.e., rewriting) approximately 4,000 applications.”

Dimon also surveyed the competitive landscape, highlighting Walmart and Apple as non-banks muscling in on JPMorgan Chase’s territory.

“Large tech companies, already 100% digital, have hundreds of millions of customers, as well as enormous resources, in data and proprietary systems — all of which give them an extraordinary competitive advantage,” he writes.

Dimon has long talked up the threat of non-banks, warning the industry should be “scared shitless”, and pushed for technology spending to help see them off. But last year he faced criticism from shareholders for failing to provide enough detail about the bank’s mammoth tech outlay plans.