Rohan Amin, CIO of Chase Bank - The Tech Behind The Largest Bank In The U.S.

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:02) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Rohan, the CIO of Chase at JPMorgan Chase, and they discuss the cool tech behind running the largest bank in the United States, how Chase has been hiring a diverse set of engineers from coding bootcamps rather than traditional four-year degrees, and JPMorgan Chase's strategy for keeping all 12,000-plus employees on the same page. All of this right here, right now on the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Rohan at 00:00:39) Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:40) This is the Modern CTO Podcast.

(Rohan at 00:00:51) I guess the journey starts many years ago. I was in DC after I graduated school. I went to school in Philadelphia at University of Pennsylvania, and then I moved to Maryland to get my first job at Lockheed Martin. And this is at a time sort of like the .com excitement back in the day. I had a choice: go to a small startup, which seemed very intriguing at the time, or join a very large, global aerospace defense company. And much to the urging from my father, I went the route of joining Lockheed Martin. Good news, I guess, is that that startup didn't last very long, and so it probably turned out to be sage advice from my dad.

(Rohan at 00:01:39) And so I went to work at Lockheed Martin and got my start there as a software engineer. And over the course of 13 years, had a number of different roles over there—everything from software engineering, information technology, did some cybersecurity work, electronic warfare work, stuff for intelligence community customers and three-letter agencies, and all sorts of fun stuff. And so my last job at Lockheed Martin was I was leading a business that was facing the defense department and intelligence community, offering cybersecurity electronic warfare systems and capabilities to the US government. So that was super fun.

(Rohan at 00:02:22) And then I got a call to consider coming to JPMorgan Chase, and I took the call, interviewed with the bank, and joined the bank in 2014. And I've been here heading into almost seven years, and it's just been fantastic as a journey for me. And so at the bank, I've had two main roles. One was I was the Global Chief Information Security Officer for the bank, and so led a team of 3,000 people and about $600 million a year that we spend on cybersecurity defending the bank globally. And then now for the past almost three years, I run all of retail technology for Chase.

(Rohan at 00:03:11) And so anything from credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, checking and savings, the branches, ATMs, chase.com, the mobile app, wealth management—all of that technology that faces customers is the team that I lead at Chase. And so it's been a lot of fun. Really enjoy being in financial services and being at Chase, and lots to talk about. But that's been a little bit about my journey.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:43) I love it. So when you were like age 10, what did you want to be when you grew up?

(Rohan at 00:03:48) I was going to be a doctor when I was age 10. And so actually, I went to school as a pre-med student. I didn't last very long. I think I lasted for like maybe one semester, and I remember coming home and telling my dad, this ain't going to happen. Time for me to switch out of this pre-med track and let me get into something that I always had an affinity and sort of a passion for—computers and engineering. And so I switched into a computer and telecommunications and electrical engineering program, and then the rest took from there. But yeah, I went to school pursuing pre-med and decided that wasn't going to be the thing for me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:33) And so I'm curious to know, you go from there all the way up to being the—is your official title CIO at JPMorgan Chase?

(Rohan at 00:04:41) Yeah, CIO for Chase at JPMorgan Chase. Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) Okay, so there's got to be so many different areas where you can spend your time to the point where it's overwhelming. How do you figure out where you need to allocate your resources?

(Rohan at 00:04:57) Yeah, no, that's great. There probably isn't—there are too many things to do and not enough time in the day, for sure. And where I spend my time—so first, just a little bit of context, I guess.

(Rohan at 00:05:10) JPMorgan Chase has 50,000-plus people in its technology organization and more than $12 billion that we spend on technology. So it's just a massive enterprise. And the Chase side of things, which is the retail portion of the overall bank, is about 12,000 people and $4 billion that we spend on technology. So that's just a little bit of the landscape that we're doing. So I'm probably leading a team of 12,000-plus technologists and engineers who build all the customer experiences that everyone engages with us on every single day.

(Rohan at 00:05:49) So there's lots of things that I need to spend my time on. But probably where I spend the most of my time is on talent and with the team. And so constantly obsessing over the fact of, do we have the right leaders in place? Do we have the right talent in place? How do we advance talent in the organization? How do we put people in the right roles, set them up for success? And all of that is certainly one big category of where I spend my time. And then the second one I'd say is on product development with the team. And so what are the experiences we're creating for customers? Are we obsessing over the details? How are we building it? How are we building it in a way that lets us scale?

(Rohan at 00:06:25) And when I say scale, we've got more than 40 million active mobile customers on our platform and more than 50 million active digital customers overall. And so there's a lot of people who touch and use our experiences every single day. And so obsessing over the details of how we build software, how we build our technology, and spending time with the teams is another big category of where I spend my time on a day-to-day basis. And I'm an engineer at heart, and so I love getting into the weeds with the team and really spending time understanding and focusing on the customer experience and making sure we get it right.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:06) You spend a lot of time on talent. What do you look for when bringing on new members to the team?

(Rohan at 00:07:11) You know, it's a great question, and I'd say it depends a little bit about what roles and what things we're talking about. But first, let me just talk about leaders first. So leaders in this organization have a few attributes and certainly things that I'm looking for. First, you have to be a great people leader. That is table stakes, right? You got to know how to lead, inspire, and grow teams, and you got to be someone that people want to follow.

(Rohan at 00:07:43) You also have to be a great engineer and a great technologist. And so I want leaders in this organization who can debate the details, who can get into the technology and understand how software is built and created, and have that conversation with engineers in the organization. And fundamentally, I do think engineers want to work for other engineers who understand their craft. And so that is what I would say for the leadership aspect of this. And people who have a constant sense of urgency and want to continue to push forward and get better and improve.

(Rohan at 00:08:19) For people that we hire as engineers in the organization, I'd say our viewpoint on this has evolved over time. And what do I mean by that? Certainly, we like to hire people who have a strong computer science background, and the vast majority of what we're hiring is all software engineering talent. But what has changed is you don't necessarily have to have a four-year computer science degree to come get a job in software engineering at JPMorgan Chase. We have invested quite a bit in people who come through alternative or non-traditional backgrounds—folks who may go through a nonprofit bootcamp, folks who maybe did a biology degree or did a math degree or something else and want to pivot into software engineering.

(Rohan at 00:09:05) We have development programs for all of them to bring them in. And the most important attribute when you go through that is not whether they can write Java or anything other very specific thing. It's, do they have the aptitude and the mindset and the hunger and the thirst to learn? And what we find is that when we combine that along with our training and development programs, in a couple years' time, when you compare them versus other software engineers who may have come from a more traditional path, sometimes you can't tell the difference. And that, I think, has been an evolution in sort of how we think about keeping an open aperture on talent.

(Rohan at 00:09:45) We have people who are musicians, people who worked in the restaurant industry, people who were mathematicians, people who worked in science, and they've all decided they want to go try their hand at software and creating systems at scale, and they're doing it. And we invest a lot to help equip them with the right skills and know-how and the right opportunities to be able to practice and do it in a meaningful way at Chase.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:11) I love that. So I saw that you were at Lockheed Martin for 12-plus years. You've been here at JPMorgan for seven-plus years. Why do you stay? What causes you to stick around?

(Rohan at 00:10:25) Yeah. So for me, the most important thing is to be at a place where I have a real sense of purpose and a mission, if you will. And so certainly in the defense community, I had that where we're doing things for the country, for national security reasons, and you felt a real sense of a higher purpose that you were a part of. Equally, I feel that at JPMorgan Chase. It was actually the reason why I came here. This bank is one of the most systemically important financial institutions in the world. It processes an incredible amount of money on a day-to-day basis. We have relationships with more than half of the households in the country have a relationship with Chase.

(Rohan at 00:11:30) And so it's a very important part of a lot of people's lives on a matter that is very important to them—their finances, their money. And so there aren't many things that are more personal than money and finances and helping people develop the right financial behaviors and health and all that. That to me is the reason why I'm here. It's that purpose. It's the why, it's the what are we doing that really matters to people, and we're doing it at a scale that's incredible—the tens of millions of people who interact with our platform every single day. And so the combination of scale, the combination of purpose, are the two big reasons I'm here.

(Rohan at 00:12:05) I'd say another one, which is really important to me, is a chance to work with just really, really smart people every single day. Every day I meet new people at the bank, and the people I work with every single day, the folks here are just brilliant, and I learn from them. And so that makes me better. It pushes me, and it shows me areas that I don't know yet, and it gives me a chance to try out new things and get to know areas that I don't have a background in. And so the chance to be part of that is also just exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:32) I like it. I'm a fan, by the way. I am a customer of Chase. And the reason why was I was driving by and I saw the blue ATM. This is like years ago. And I drove up. I'm like, all right, I'll get an account there if they have a really sweet UI interface on their ATM. And you guys did, because that is so important to me. At the time, I was at this bank, Regions, and it was like living in the 1900s. It was really poor. And I was like, they're not a small community bank. They're pretty large, but they had made no investment in the user experience. And then I saw that there was really only, when I did the research, there was really only two companies at the time that were advanced, and it was Wells Fargo and Chase. Those were the two companies that I think led the transformation for other people and forced other people to have to invest significantly in their user experiences. So thank you for that.

(Rohan at 00:13:31) Well, Joel, first, thanks for being a customer. And now you know who to call. If you ever got a question or something you see—I get folks all the time who ping me and say, "Hey, I saw this thing or that thing." We have, like everybody, sometimes we have bugs and stuff, and we go and fix them. And so now you know who to call, so send that stuff in. I obsess over those details. And yeah, as far as we're concerned, yes, we have an award-winning app, and we've been recognized multiple times for our mobile experience and our digital experience and the customer satisfaction that folks get when working with us and banking with us, and we're very proud of that. That said, there is always more to do, and we are just investing in creating the best experience as possible and constantly innovating and updating the app and updating the experience and all that for customers. So lots to do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:29) Where are you located physically?

(Rohan at 00:14:31) I'm north of the city. I'm north of New York City, where I live. But where I'm actually right now is in Midtown Manhattan, just right outside Grand Central Terminal in good old New York City. So great to be here. And actually, just over the past—it's good to be back actually in the office since over the past, call it 18 months. Certainly didn't leave my driveway much, I'm sure as is the case for many people with the pandemic. And so it has been nice to get back in the office, and we've been encouraging people to get back in the office in what we call sort of a hybrid model, which is sort of a two to three days in the office, two to three days at home, because people want flexibility to be able to work from home on an occasional basis. But the office has real value, and at least for me, coming to the office has been really great because what normally would have been a 30-minute Zoom meeting is now a two-minute conversation with somebody real quick. And you have all these in-person interactions, and it's just easier to build relationships in person than over a camera.

(Rohan at 00:15:40) And so the office has been great. Glad to be back. And we're doing this hybrid thing as our approach to returning to the office.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:49) I like it. And as a person who's done 400 of these over Zoom, I can tell you the relationships that I have where I'm on a basis where I'm texting people is when I'm in their city and we end up hanging out and developing a genuine long-term relationship. And so I am 100% certain that it's easier to develop relationships in person.

(Rohan at 00:16:12) Yeah, Joel, where are you, actually?

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:14) So today I'm in a lovely hotel in Austin. I am in the middle of a seven-week trip around the United States. So we are on the last week here. We went all over from Nebraska, Montana, Denver, Austin, and then back down to Florida.

(Rohan at 00:16:34) That's incredible. Austin is a great city. It's been about three years or so since I've been to Austin, but love being down there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:42) Oh yeah. And so my home base is in Tampa, Florida, just south of Tampa. And yeah, we went fully remote after when COVID happened. But we've got team members in Orlando and in our city and then all over the United States.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:58) So what we do to get our sense of in-person is at the end of every quarter, we fly everyone to some central location for a team dinner.

(Rohan at 00:17:05) Oh, that's really great. I mean, that's exactly it, right? You want to be able to keep those relationships going and be able to interact with people in person. So that's fantastic.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:15) I wanted to—I was looking at the notes and Adam had said that you guys are doing some pretty cool stuff with fraud detection. Are you excited about that? I want to hear about it.

(Rohan at 00:17:25) Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, first, for me at least, with the background that I have, fraud is just a great sort of natural pivot between my background in cybersecurity as well as being able to create a great experience, right, for customers. And so we have invested quite a bit in how we deal with the fraud problem, and a lot of it has to do with machine learning and analytics that we are running at scale. And that provides for just a better experience for the customer, first and foremost, in terms of making sure things that are valid are approved and things that are bad are not, and also, you know, keeps the bank safe as well.

(Rohan at 00:18:05) So it keeps customers safe, keeps the bank safe. It's just a great overall outcome. So, yeah, we've invested quite a bit in machine learning—everything from, you know, how do we make sure that transactions that are coming in when you swipe your credit card, that they're valid ones and not fraudulent, to looking at the checks. And yes, a lot of people still send checks in.

(Rohan at 00:18:28) A lot of people use the mobile app to send checks in, or they go to the ATM or the branch, and so people are still using checks. And we have machine learning algorithms that analyze the checks to make sure that they're valid and not fraudulent, and that the, you know, the signatures look like signatures from that customer, as an example. So there's a lot happening in that arena, and there's a lot more that we're still going to be doing with regards to machine learning. And this is like at really large scale, right?

(Rohan at 00:18:57) So we are the number one card issuer in the country, and we just, you know, from a transaction volume standpoint—name it, like any category you can probably think of, we're, you know, the largest or one of the largest. And so being able to apply things like machine learning and build algorithms that run at the scale of the data that we have is frankly just a lot of fun. And, you know, you're creating a great customer experience and keeping people safe at the same time. And so, like, there's a lot of things that make that just an exciting space to be in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:27) Are there any products that have rolled out recently, or any big news headlines that have come out for what you guys are doing in the past, you know, three or four months that we want to get some attention for?

(Rohan at 00:19:37) No. What I would say is the past year, for sure, has been super busy, and largely because of, you know, the pandemic and how we had to show up for customers and make sure we were there for them in a significant way. So I'm sure you've heard about things like the PPP program for small businesses and the government rollout of stimulus to support small businesses. We had a fair amount of work to do to make sure that we could support businesses and get funds out to those businesses so they could pay their employees at a time that was pretty rough, you know, for the country and those small businesses. We had payment assistance we had to launch, which is for people who were having a hard time paying, you know, their auto loan or their mortgage, as an example. How do we help them, or their credit card bill? How do we help them with payment assistance? And we built that as a whole capability.

(Rohan at 00:20:35) And these are things that were never on any plan, and so we started them literally in the year and had to pivot around. And it's why I'm so proud of our agile operating model and how we build software here—is that we have the ability to be very nimble and very responsive, and we did exactly that. As far as other capability that we've built that is out there and that we continue to improve on and innovate, and it's actually an interesting intersection with machine learning, which I was referring to earlier, which is something called Snapshot. And Snapshot is a capability that we have. It's in the mobile app, and it's specific to you as a customer.

(Rohan at 00:21:14) And it gives you trends and insights about your particular financial profile and gives you tips and guidance specific to you and your data. And so if you log in to the mobile app right at the top when you after you log in, you would see Snapshot, and you'll see all these tiles that give you data which is specific to you. And so the reason why that's interesting is not only the benefit for the customers—it's one of the features that we get a lot of positive feedback on—but it's also an element of how we think about personalization in terms of how do we make sure that we use the data in a way to give you good insights into your spending trends, into other aspects of your financial life. And so it's more than just let me see my balance, but now it's you're telling me something very helpful. And all of that is built on machine learning. It's built on data and analytics. And so being able to do that for, you know, 50 million customers and present information specific to one person in the app is definitely just a great overall experience.

(Rohan at 00:22:15) And that is sort of where things are heading, which is more personalization, more, you know, things which are geared particularly to the person who is logging in and insights and guidance and things like that that are helpful to you. And so that's just a quick sort of sampling of stuff we did last year during the pandemic, but also things that we have out there right now which are live for customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:38) I'm curious about how you communicate across your organization. I mean, you've got thousands of engineers. They need a leader, right? They obviously have their, you know, team leads and directors and VPs. But when you communicate with the organization, do you have someone that helps you do that, like a head of communications? How do you interact with the organization as an entire entity?

(Rohan at 00:23:01) Yeah, this is a great question and one that I spend a lot of time on. So yes, we do have a communications team, a technology and digital communications team. They're absolutely fantastic, and I want to give them a shout-out right now because they're just so good. And we invest in that team because I view it as a critical capability, you know, for the organization overall. And so what does that mean? There's a variety of things that we do that I try to do as an organization for the organization. And when you're leading a team of, you know, more than 12,000 people, you've got a lot to work through from a communication standpoint. So, for example, I invite junior folks in the organization to senior-level meetings. And they can sit in on those meetings. They get the same materials as everyone else does, and they participate and engage in the conversations just like anybody else who might report to me directly, as an example.

(Rohan at 00:23:58) And they ask questions, and they engage, and they have a dialogue. And the reason I do that is because, one, to help demystify what is it leaders are doing behind the scenes, because when you're a large organization it can kind of seem very large, and try to make things small in terms of what are those, you know, management-type people doing? And so we want to provide some transparency, you know, to that. The second thing is the best messenger in the organization isn't me necessarily. It's your peers.

(Rohan at 00:24:25) And so when people hear about what was discussed at one of the meetings they're able to attend and they go back and they share that with their team, it's just a lot more relatable and a lot more—they have a lot more context. And then, you know, third is they're better members of the team because they understand better the journey that we're going on, or they have zoomed out on some big-picture thing because they were able to participate in this senior-level meeting. So that's an example of something that we do. Every single week I send out a note to my organization. We call it Five-Minute Freestyle, which is just my thoughts on what's going on, some top-of-mind items.

(Rohan at 00:25:05) You know, either we'll highlight, hey, we've had this problem and how we should think about that going forward, or here's an element of our strategy and how to think about that, or recognizing a team and a team that did something great. I'll just put a few notes in there and we'll send it out. And so we've had a lot of great feedback on Five-Minute Freestyle. It's just a way for folks to stay connected and know directly what I'm thinking about, and they also like getting recognized in front of the entire organization for great work that they're doing.

(Rohan at 00:25:36) And then, of course, you know, we do town halls. I do a lot of live Q&A sessions with employees. In fact, just before this session, I was doing a Q&A session with some of our entry-level engineers to hear from them directly, small group. And so I do small groups of, like, 20 people to hear from them directly, give them an opportunity to ask me any questions, and share with them our strategy and learn from them in terms of what we're doing right and where we can be better. And so we seek a lot of feedback, and the communications team helps orchestrate all this stuff.

(Rohan at 00:26:12) And they're just critical to maintaining that sort of fluid information to the organization. So I think of this as very strategic and very important to being able to lead an organization at scale.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:25) I'm glad I asked that question. I just learned a ton. That was great. Okay. In the meeting before, when you're meeting with the new entry engineers, what type of questions are they asking?

(Rohan at 00:26:38) Yeah, no, that's great. They, you know, Joel, they are asking questions around everything from how should they think about their career and how do they find the next role. They're asking questions around how long should they stay technical in their career, and when should they pivot to management, quote-unquote.

(Rohan at 00:26:59) And that I have a whole spiel on that one for sure. My short answer is stay technical for as long as you possibly can is my answer to that question. There's more detail behind that. But they'll ask questions like, you know, what technologies are we investing in, and what new things are we creating? But they'll also share feedback.

(Rohan at 00:27:20) Things like, hey, you know, this process seems like it's just not as streamlined as it could be. You know, how do we think about that? Can we make it better? Or, you know, I have to use this tool to do my job. It's okay, but it's not the best. Can we make it better?

(Rohan at 00:27:32) And so they're very open, which is just great. And I think part of the culture is just to create a safe environment for people to share whatever it is they want to share. And it's not like the layers of managers are there. It's just them and me talking, and we just get a chance to hear from the folks on the ground, like, what is the day-in-the-life every single day, which I love. That stuff—I love sort of figuring out how do we get out of their way, how do we unblock them, how do we remove friction in their day-to-day experience, how do we make it so they can be more productive engineers, how do we make it so that they can deliver more capability to customers faster. And the way we do that is by learning through these sessions. But those are some of the questions. It's like everything from career stuff to, you know, what's going well to what we can improve on as an organization.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:22) I love it. Tell me more. Stay technical as long as possible before going to management. I want you to expand on that.

(Rohan at 00:28:29) You know, sometimes people will come to me and say, you know, hey, so I've been coding for two years. Can I get into management now? And I'm like, to manage what? Like, to do what?

(Rohan at 00:28:40) And they're like, well, I want to manage other engineers. I'm like, that's great. But, you know, I do think engineers want to work for people who understand what they're doing. And I think especially in the space where you're building technology for customers and you're part of the sort of revenue-generating portion of the organization and you want to be, you know, creating things that are differentiating and market-differentiating and that sort of thing, you have to be close to the technology, and you have to be able to get into details with your teams and be able to have a conversation and have a point of view and have an opinion and help an engineer understand how they should refine their craft. We should be designing it this way. We should think about that architecture. We should think about these set of tools. We should have this level of discipline.

(Rohan at 00:29:19) Like, those come from being, you know, an expert, being, learning your craft. And so that's why I've always been very focused on making sure we have leaders who are both great people leaders but great technologists. And so that's why I encourage people to stay technical as long as they can. And at some point, the leadership thing will come, but at least at that point they have had a very good grounding and solid grounding as an engineer, and they're just more credible, frankly, leading other engineers in the organization when they themselves have that background. And so I just don't want people to jump out too quick, thinking they, you know, code for two years and they jump into management. Like, I still write software.

(Rohan at 00:30:12) And the reason I do that is because it helps me stay sharp. It helps me stay relevant. And I think that's just something that, you know, especially in technology and in software engineering, you need to stay relevant. Things that happened two years ago have changed dramatically. Two years from now, it'll change again. You've got to make sure that you're able to keep up.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:27) I agree. I was just thinking back as you were talking—I pulled up the calculator real quick. It says, like, 20 years. But so I've got a solid 17 years plus programming, right? It's just that's what I did. It's who I was. And I would say from the beginning, right at the beginning, I was super headstrong. Like, oh, I'm great. This is awesome. Around year five, I was like, oh, man, I really don't know much. And then I think between year seven and 10, I felt comfortable in my skin as a programmer. Like, I could hold my own in a conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) And then I think around year 12, I got to the point where, oh, everything's the same. Like, I had mastered more than one language. I had this new perspective of code and how it's written and how it's structured. You know, I have preferences on who I learned from. Like, Fowler—I'm a huge fan of his.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:21) And so I follow these people and you get to a point where you're at the top and you start realizing that these patterns or systems or methodologies are all argued about by the brightest people who've been around for the longest, right? So they've been doing it for 40 years and then they're arguing about best practices, and you can kind of start to figure out the different camps that exist and thoughts, and you can have preferences and integrate them into your projects. And so, yeah, I could see how, like, two years in the program, you're not going to have that. You're not even going to have made the big mistakes that you wish you wouldn't have.

(Rohan at 00:31:56) Exactly. And you mentioned Fowler, and you mentioned some points that basically have convinced me over time that technology is a little bit like religion, and so you kind of have to figure out how you navigate these conversations with people. Because inevitably, when you're leading a team of very smart technologists, you'll have all sorts of opinions, and you've got to figure out how to navigate the opinions and kind of get to a point of view. But that's the kind of stuff, frankly, for me personally, that I love spending time on with the teams, which is when we're building stuff for customers, obsessing over the details. Like, how does this show up from a customer experience standpoint? What does the customer see? Are we designing this thing correctly?

(Rohan at 00:32:34) Do we have the right domain-driven design? Do we have the right architecture? All of that is sort of the stuff that I love debating with the teams. And I feel like if you don't have the technology background and you haven't stayed technical, then it's very difficult for you to engage in that kind of dialogue with the organization. So that's why I've been such a proponent of staying technical for as long as you can.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:56) Yes. I like it. Well said. I'm glad I dug into that one. I'm curious.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:02) For your direct reports, I'm going to ask you a hypothetical question. Like, if you could design the perfect leadership training program for your direct reports, what are the top two or three concepts that you would want in that program?

(Rohan at 00:33:15) This is great. And, Joel, I appreciate that question. Not only for my direct reports, but just for leaders in the organization, but certainly for senior leaders in the organization, I would say there's a few aspects of what we're looking for and the development program to do it. First and foremost, I would say making sure that people are rooted in the business strategy is really important. And at senior levels, yes, you have to have a strong technical background, but you have to understand the business strategy and how you're enabling it and making sure that people appreciate and understand what that strategy is and how, as technologists, we make that happen.

(Rohan at 00:33:58) There's another point I'll come back to in a minute, which is the way you work in the organization and how you have the right partnership with the business is critically important, but I'll come back to that point in a second. So I'd say business strategy for sure. And then, you know, I'd say the second dimension is, certainly, as technologists, there's always more things for us to learn. And so as much as we think we all know, there's always something more to know. And so how do we make sure that we're up on the latest with regards to how we build software and how do we create experiences for customers that leverage all the greatest tech from that standpoint?

(Rohan at 00:34:39) And then third, especially as a senior leadership team—and the second thing was really about learning—but the third thing is really about chemistry, which is, you know, when you're on a team and especially if you're a senior leader in an organization, everyone has their own teams that they're leading. But I've always said that the first team is your team of peers. That's your first team, and your second team is the team that you directly manage. And the reason for that is, especially when you're trying to solve the big problem, solve something strategic, it really has to do with your peer team that will go solve those big problems. And so I think an important part of leadership development is also the relationship building and having the right team chemistry across that team so that they feel like they are able to go in there together as a team, as a unit, and solve any problem when it comes forward. I want leaders when they come and sit at my table that they're not just focused on their particular area. They're focused on the problem that I'm thinking about as well for the entire organization. And so keeping that perspective in mind when they're trying to solve a particular problem that they're seeing in their area. So there's a number of dimensions to sort of the qualities that I'm looking for in leaders in the organization. But I want to go back to something I referenced earlier, which is, you know, it's important to have the technology background, but it's increasingly more important to figure out how you work with the business. And so what do I mean by that?

(Rohan at 00:36:13) You know, back in the day, people stood up projects, and you'd have a project, and you'd figure out how you get this project done in the technology organization. But the organizations that move the quickest, that bring feature and function to customers faster and provide value faster are agile software development, but have product teams and a partnership with the business, with product owners who understand how to run a product end-to-end and who work with technology very closely to build capability for customers with a very strong point of view around the customer experience and what we're trying to create. Because all these things, you know, any button that you see in the app, it seems so simple. It's just a button. And in fact, I gave a whole talk called "Just a Button," but people see something very simple—it's a button—but beneath that button is all sorts of stuff you've got to build to make that button so simply work.

(Rohan at 00:37:20) And so you can have people who just focus on the button, or you have product owners who obsess over the entirety of end-to-end and how do you think about bringing the button to life through all the stuff you have to do and all the myriad of decisions that you have to make to make that button come to life. And so we actually have—Chase is structured into about 90 product teams. And so we have strong product owners, strong tech leaders, and they are responsible jointly for all of the capabilities that you see at Chase. And so we think that's the best partnership with the business, one that allows us to move and pivot very quickly. It's the reason during the pandemic that we were able to launch things like the PPP program.

(Rohan at 00:38:05) We launched that in like 14 days, less than 14 days. I think it was 10 days. We went from nothing to a full offering digitally available to customers, and we had a billion dollars of loans done in a week. And to do that means that you have to have a really great partnership between the business and technology and a real sense of purpose and mission, which is what that product team is focused on. So, like, yes, even institutions like ours, long in history, operate like digital native companies that you see out there in terms of how they build and deliver capability to customers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:43) Well, it sounds really exciting and your culture is awesome and I'm a fan of you, my friend, as an individual. I'm curious, people that want to learn more about potentially working at Chase or working with you, how would they go about that?

(Rohan at 00:38:57) Yeah. Lots of ways. One, I'm on LinkedIn and people ping me all the time, and so happy to always engage like that. We obviously also have a pretty extensive technology blog on our site at jpmorgan.com. There's a technology blog as well, and also our careers page that's there, and people can learn more about what we're doing. But we also do presentations at a number of industry conferences. You know, our technologists are out there. You can probably find them by searching JPMorgan Chase on YouTube and on Google. You'll find videos of presentations that we've done, content that we have out there, stuff that we've published on AWS with Amazon, the work that we're doing there around data and machine learning. So we're out there quite a bit, and you can reach out to any of us to learn more about what we're doing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:49) I love it. I love it. Do you have a chief evangelist for technology, or is that you?

(Rohan at 00:39:56) I think to some degree, it's probably me. But what I would say is a lot of people in the organization evangelize what we're doing here. We have a lot of people sharing out there, we have a lot of people presenting, putting stuff on social media and LinkedIn. It's because we're so excited about all the things that we're doing, the chance that we get to work on great technology, the culture that we have around lots of collaboration, people-first environment, and the ability to work on something that really matters to people, which is their finances. And so I'd say a lot of people are out there evangelizing and very proud to be here every single day.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:33) I love it. And last thing as we wrap up, because we're coming up on time here. Am I right to understand you—Chase has a programming boot camp? You have your own boot camp?

(Rohan at 00:40:43) We do. We do. And in fact, that was the session I was doing just before this one. It's a group that we call Tech Connect. And so what we do is we take folks who don't necessarily have a computer science background—maybe they had a math background, or a biology background, or art background, or something else—and they want to pivot into software engineering, and we invest in them, and we put them through a training program. And we have various types of these, so some of them start out with the beginning of how do you write Java and how do you code, all the way to how do you work in the Chase specific environment. How do you use our CI/CD pipeline?

(Rohan at 00:41:28) How do you build and deploy software? You know, what are the frameworks we use? All that sort of stuff. And so, yes, we take people from learning how to code all the way to being productive members of our engineering teams. And so we invest quite a bit in that development.

(Rohan at 00:41:45) We have live events that we do, something we call Power Up, where we bring our best technologists together and do live training and hands-on labs and things to help people learn something new or refine a particular area that they're interested in. So there's a significant amount of investment that we have in terms of people being able to develop their skills. And it's all the skills that people want, which is, you want to learn about the cloud? Great. You want to learn about machine learning and advanced analytics?

(Rohan at 00:42:15) Great. Whatever the topic is, we have that, and we're building that, and so people get a chance to learn that here at the firm.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:22) I love it. You know, I've gotten to go around the country and visit different IT people and organizations, and there was actually one that stood out to me. I think it was in Nashville, Tennessee. And what they did was they had this huge, like, government or county-type local government mission initiative where they were taking people from the service industry and retraining them. And then their model was, I think, a recruiting model. They would have relationships with other companies. But I love the creativity of you guys just saying, hey, let's just do this ourselves.

(Rohan at 00:42:54) The reason why—another benefit that we've had by doing it that way—and we partner with nonprofit boot camps around the country, and we work with them as well, and we have our own sort of training programs that we have in-house. But one thing that I think is really interesting is we have a very strong focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion, and so that's a big—it's important to me personally and important as a firm. But one thing that's been interesting about these programs is that when we open the aperture and we focus on talent from different backgrounds, we actually get more diverse representation from the talent that is coming into the firm. And so it not only advances our ability to hire more people, it also advances our ability to hire different representation and different diverse backgrounds. And when you're building an app for millions of customers, you want to make sure that your employee base looks like the customers that you're serving, because how better to make sure that you've thought through everything and to make sure that you're thinking about the right customer experience when you have a team that looks like and represents the experiences of the customers that you're serving.

(Rohan at 00:44:05) And so I think about DEI in that lens, which is it's a really important part of being able to serve customers effectively is having a diverse workforce.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:17) Yeah. And your line of business more so than most because you guys serve the entire public. Right? You're not just—you're not like a SaaS tool just serving software developers. You serve everybody that can open a bank account. And so, yeah, I think that that's one of the better places to talk about DEI. Like, I like it.

(Rohan at 00:44:39) Yeah. It's been a huge focus for us. Like I said, it's something I'm personally invested in. I spent a lot of time, and we do things like foster open communications in the firm. We've had open conversations about racism and what it means to people who've had to grow up with challenging experiences. And what I've heard by doing these conversations is that people have gone through diversity-type training for years and why it's important. But when they hear it from a fellow colleague and they hear about some of the things that people have to deal with and why we need to better appreciate why this is so important, that personal interaction is more impactful than 10 years of diversity training ever will be. And so making it a safe place for people to have the conversation, to be able to share their personal experiences, to be able to have the conversation about what's going on out there and why it's important to them—that's part of the culture that we have here, and I think it's important to have that inclusive environment that allows people to be able to feel safe to have that dialogue.

(Joel Beasley at 00:45:41) Yeah. I like the way you articulated that. I'm going to listen back to that later and copy that and share that with other people. But, yeah, last night, for the first time, I watched this Netflix special with this lady named Brené Brown, I think is her name. Have you heard of her before?

(Rohan at 00:45:58) What special is this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:00) I don't know. It was just—I think it was just called Brené Brown. I hope I'm saying it right.

(Rohan at 00:46:05) I haven't. Yeah. No. I haven't heard of that one.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:08) But she talks about vulnerability. She's like a shame researcher, but she talks about vulnerability and, you know, courage and how they're connected. And one of the things in that Netflix talk that she had, and I highly recommend it too—it's really good—but one of the things she had was having the DEI-type conversations, and she really articulated it well. And so I'll pass that along to you.

(Rohan at 00:46:33) Yeah. No. That'd be great. Always looking for different people's views on this topic. And, you know, it's just an important part of the culture and the environment and an environment that people want to be in and to be a part of.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:47) Yes. Well, man, we did it. Rohan, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Rohan at 00:46:54) This is great, Joel. It's been great having a chat with you, and for folks who are listening, I just want to put a mention out there that we're hiring like crazy. And so we have roles across the country where I can't hire fast enough. And in fact, I am not constrained by anything other than my ability to hire people in a quality and diverse way into the organization. And so there's lots of opportunity here at Chase, and we are absolutely focused on investing in technology and digital and using that to transform the customer experience.

(Rohan at 00:47:31) And so we're open is what I would say.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:50) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email: [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.