JPMorgan To Open FinTech Office In Silicon Valley

JPMorgan Chase is doubling down with its FinTech aspirations, gearing up to start development of a new FinTech corporate campus in the early part of 2019.

CNBC reported that the campus in Palo Alto, California will be home to more than 1,000 employees. The campus will be located between Facebook and Google in the Stanford Research Park. JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon views technology as a way to keep back the competition from FinTech startups that are luring over millennial customers in droves. The CEO also sees technology as the key way to address and fend off cyberattacks and financial fraud. CNBC noted that in his most recent letter to shareholders, Dimon said that the bank had nearly 50,000 employees in tech and that it was investing money in artificial intelligence and machine learning aimed at reducing risk, enhancing underwriting and building its cloud infrastructure.

The FinTech campus is slated to open in 2020 and comes on the heels of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of WePay, the digital payments company that competes against PayPal and Stripe. WePay has more than 275 workers who will be moving to the Palo Alto office once it’s complete, noted the report. Tina Hsiao, WePay’s operating chief, told CNBC in an interview that the idea for the new office has been on the table since the acquisition and Dimon’s commitment to double the number of engineers at WePay. “This is him planting that flag,” Hsiao said in an interview. “The leaders have said: We’re not tourists, we’re here to stay.” The WePay executive told CNBC that the acquisition of WePay is counter to the longstanding narrative that big companies destroy startup cultures. She said WePay has benefited because it got access to a whole new group of partners.

While Dimon is supportive of cutting-edge technology and digital payments, he’s not a supporter of all emerging technologies. Dimon famously called bitcoin, the leading cryptocurrency, a fraud.