JPMorgan, Goldman and others are easing their dress codes in a bid for tech talent

The mention of financial giants like JPMorgan or Goldman Sachs conjures up images of staid suits, ties and corner offices in ivory towers. But for the last two years they’ve been trying to look more like the tech companies they so often claim to be. Now, they’re taking the next step by relaxing their dress codes.

Goldman’s workforce is nearly 70 percent millennial, according to a LinkedIn post by its head of human capital management. Last month, the bank relaxed the dress code for its tech employees, telling them to “exercise judgment in determining when to adapt to business attire.” It’s probably safe to say that if they aren’t meeting with clients, they need not suit up. Jeans are allowed, according to one Goldman engineer. Some people wear hoodies.

“It’s somewhat of a symbolic gesture,” said the engineer, something the firm can do to “not be seen as another stuffy organization but more as one that emphasizes creativity” and to “make Goldman engineering more attractive to millennials.”

Goldman’s move came a year after the almost 150-year-old investment bank launched GS Bank — an Internet-based savings bank for the masses — and months after it launched Marcus, an online lending “startup within Goldman” — two new digital businesses that require a lot of tech expertise.

JPMorgan Chase opted a firmwide business casual dress policy last summer, noting in an internal memo that “it may not be possible to dress business casual at all times or in all areas.”

That was just a couple months after the largest U.S. lender by assets moved its coders, data engineers and digital executives (who were mostly new to the banking industry) to a separate facility on Manhattan’s West Side, where casual dress is the norm. Some even sport Chase digital team hoodies, according to one employee. JPM and Goldman wouldn’t comment for this story.

“They’re not client-facing people, so we wanted to relax [the dress code] because the people we want to recruit are coming from tech companies where they can be more relaxed and casual,” the Chase employee said.

JPM is now reportedly in talks to triple the size of its new digital headquarters, expecting to expand grow its 700-person digital team to as much as 2,500.

Banking giants arguably can offer more varied work than tech companies, said Bhushan Sethi, PwC’s people and organization financial services leader. Only a small percentage of the Silicon Valley workforce work for the iconic brands, whereas banks have a big need for expertise in advanced analytics, artificial intelligence and robotic process automation to help people to manage their money.

“The culture of the firm is really important for tech talent,” he said. “If they come in feeling empowered, they feel they can make a change.”

Startup and bank cultures also are coming face to face through mergers and partnerships. Last year JPMorgan launched one in its actual offices called In-Residence, where the startups work side by side with the bank. While some startups will be acquired by banks — as in BBVA’s purchase of Simple, Capital One’s purchase of Level Money and Silicon Valley Bank’s acquisition of Standard Treasury — others like Finicity will partner with them.

Cultural boundaries also are blurring as banks move into tech hubs like Austin and Cincinnati. Citi FinTech, for example, the unit dedicated to mobile-first offerings that always comes to work dressed down and celebrates its nontraditional banking culture, is expected to move to the Cornell campus soon, according to a Citi employee.

“It’s not always about attracting talent; it’s also about how you integrate talent from the technology firms you’ve acquired,” Sethi said.

As mobile payments expand, Chase Pay seeks to differentiate

Chase has been fairly quiet about Chase Pay, and is taking a small guy approach that focuses on adding value through merchant partners.

After giving a year’s warning about its imminent launch and then finally going live last October, it still feels very under the radar. It’s not marketing on social media. It’s not pushing its mobile banking users to the Chase Pay app. It’s not drawing any attention to itself.

“We purposefully have been saying we want to mirror what some of the best apps out there have done and think like a small guy a little bit in that we want get the product right and roll it out as it’s ready to the right audiences,” said Dina DeMerell, chief marketing officer at Chase Pay. “We’ve been rolling out in a measured way as features and functionality and merchants become available.”

Today, Chase Pay’s largest merchants partners include Best Buy and Starbucks — both of which let users order and pay in advance. Shell stations will join the network later this summer, according to the bank, as well as HMS Host, Atom Tickets and Parkmobile later this year. Higher end (or just “fancy”) restaurant chains in the Level Up network — with whom Chase Pay partnered in December — have been added too now, like Sweetgreen, By Chloe, Georgetown Cupcake and Fika. Earlier this year, it acquired MCX, a retailer consortium with members like Walmart and Target.

However, while the main players are playing for customer convenience — why fumble through a wallet for a piece of plastic when a customer can just tap the device that’s probably already in hand? — Chase is looking to create new value propositions for customers: offers, discounts, things that motivate a person to actually break the old habit of paying by card and creating a new habit: paying by phone.

Through the app, available only to Chase debit and credit card holders, customers can order ahead from participating restaurants, receive discounts on their order and pay for it before they arrive to pick it up; they can pay for things using Chase Ultimate Rewards points or cashback rewards; in Denver and Boston, Chase Pay is testing a feature that will allow users to save money by rounding down their bill whenever they order ahead.

“Order-ahead is a feature that can get people to use to because it actually improves the life of the customer,” said David True, a partner at PayGility Advisors. “Just switching from swiping to scanning doesn’t change a customers life or make the experience any better.” And even if the food companies have their own apps, this gives users an incentive to use Chase instead.

Since Chase announced the Pay product in 2015, Samsung Pay has added in-app payments and location-based discounts and offers, Facebook Messenger added support for group payments between friends, Starbucks introduced an order-ahead capability in its app, China’s Alipay and WeChat both arrived in the U.S. Last week, Apple Pay revealed its digital debit card and peer-to-peer payment function through iMessage. This week Zelle is coming for Venmo users through their mobile banking apps.

“Other apps have been successful and done best when they grow up slowly and get it right first, before they start marketing,” DeMerell said.

However, competing with other mobile pay products isn’t Chase’s game. Similar to Apple’s p-to-p play, Chase Pay adds value to its 26 million existing Chase customers that are digitally active on the mobile banking app. “Customers are going to decide what they want to use most,” DeMerell said. “Right now it’s important we offer a Chase solution anywhere a customer might go.”

On some level, the Apple, Samsung and Android Pay products are in direct competition with Chase Pay. Chase is playing in that space too.

“We’re supporting those products actively, we want customers to select Chase as their payment method for apple or Samsung pay. If that’s the product the customer wants to use we want to make it easy for them to connect with Chase,” she said.

After all, the merchant appeal for providing Chase Pay as a customer payment option is that they pay lower transaction fees on Chase Pay purchases than on those made with other payment methods — like the Apple, Samsung or Android Pays.

“For all of these players trying to replace plastic at the point of sale are doing it, it’s an add-on,” said True. “[It’s] hardware in Amazon’s case, probably in Samsung’s too; collecting data in Google’s case. The merchant doesn’t want to turn away any form of payments. Chase isn’t going to push it on merchants because how they make money on merchants is otherwise. They’re not going to push people hard to use this Chase Pay app.”

Inside Chase’s marketing strategy

In the three years that Karna Crawford has been working at Chase, it’s been going through some major changes.

Crawford, the bank’s head of marketing strategy and digital, said that transformation is being moved by largely by the work of financial technology startups and the contributions they’re making to financial services through digital investment products, digital consumer banking products as well as solving small banking challenges with new technology.

“It has forced us as a leading large-scale bank to think differently about how we’re connecting with consumers, how we’re thinking about the consumer experience and how to increase the mindset of how we think about innovation and a holistic integrated customer experience,” she said at an event Tuesday hosted by the The Advertising Club of New York

Here are five ways the bank’s marketing team is adapting to changing customer behavior in a digital landscape.

Chase is thinking about innovation differently by merging teams internally
Different teams and departments within the organization are breaking down barriers, committing more to integrating with each other so customers have a more integrated experience.

“Instead of thinking about acquiring, onboarding and managing the service and that those things are connected but separate – [we’re] really leaning into the collapsing of those things. Sales and marketing are one thing because technology and data and make them even more closely connected. Service and customer service and marketing and customer experience are one thing. We have to think about the total customer experience in such a different way than we’ve ever had to before. The connection that I have with my sales organization or with our ops organization etc is even more coupled and tighter than it ever has been.”

The bank is changing how it thinks of effectiveness of advertising
Like most brands, Chase is struggling with aligning objectives and sales with brand advertising. For Crawford, that means a shift from thinking about media measures to coupling of media metrics to business and outcomes.

“How do you marry brand outcomes to revenue end outcomes, how do you start to do that at a level of scale, at a level of consistency, that you can do it and replicate it with the minimum number of resources as possible? We’re a bank so we’re highly analytical no matter what.”

Brand safety is a cause for concern
Chase recently conducted a whittling down of websites where its advertising appeared, to prevent it from popping up in fake news sites or offensive YouTube videos. After cutting the 400,000 websites to just 5,000 pre-approved, it found the cost of impressions and visibility of its ads actually changed very little.

Crawford said that experiment is top of mind: “How the world would have reacted to a brand being in certain content three years ago is fundamentally different from how it would react to the same thing now. PR consequences are a little more sensitive and a lot more heightened than they were in the past.”

To fix it, Chase wants to regain control
At the end of the day, the advertisers are the ones accountable for brand safety and transparency, Crawford said.

“The real thing that’s happening beneath the surface is this push to say ‘Hey, advertisers, you have a role in this value chain too and you need to step up and control a little bit more what’s happening where your business is and set clearer expectations and demands for your partners that are supporting businesses forward.”

Talent remains a problem in marketing
Employees’ skills, capabilities and mindsets need to be up to the challenge of an organization breaking down department silos and blending once distinct areas of business.

“We’re shifting from a world where some of your marketing talent was good at making TV ads and understanding frequency and [gross rating point] to a world where they can have that conversation at levels far into an organization beyond ourselves. As we are making all of these dynamic challenges in the marketing landscape for our various organizations, we’re also trying to really elevate the talent base and be able to scale people who think and operate in this new dynamic as well.”

What war on cash? ATMs are the distributed bank of the future

As a technology, the automated teller machine has been around the block. In the U.S., Chemical Bank debuted the ATM in 1969 in Rockville Center, New York. That first machine, also known as a Docuteller, disbursed cash when customers inserted a specially coded card. Almost 50 years later, as financial institutions work to transition customers to bank outside of expensive branches, the ATM is beginning to look a lot sexier.

In an effort to shift the service burden away from tellers, some of the largest U.S. banks like Chase and Bank America are undergoing significant upgrades to their ATM networks. New ATMs, some of which include cardless access and video chat, are able to provide around 90 percent of the services tellers can provide from within a bank. ATM activity continues to rise — Chase now sees more transactions from ATMs than tellers.

Banks are to growing their ATM networks outside their branches, too. According to a recent study conducted by RBR on the global ATM market, in 2015, there were more ATMs located away from bank branches than located within. 51 percent of automated teller machines in the global market are disconnected from the physical real estate of banks, giving banks a smaller but broader distributed presence within their target markets.

“It’s all about access and convenience in our click-and-mortar world,” Cardtronics’ CMO Tom Pierce told Kiosk Marketplace. “And that bodes well for retail ATM deployers, because we are the convenient access to cash that consumers demand as part of their omnichannel lifestyle.”

Replacing tellers and branches with ATMs can lower costs and if placed in high-traffic areas, see enough surcharge and interchange fees to be run at a profit. In rural areas that are hard for retail banks to service, ATMs serve an important role in financial inclusion for customers who would otherwise go unbanked.

Distributed ATM networks give banks added visibility within their communities, even as some banks shutter local branches. It’s possible that for more communities, in just a few years, the modern teller machine will be the only physical banking presence around. Instead of making customers come to branches, ATMs bring the branches to the customer.

“As independent ATM deployers expand their fleets, more and more retail centers, transport hubs and other non-branch locations will host ATMs,” said RBR’s Rowan Berridge. “Coupled with increasing off-site deployment by banks, in the future it will be even easier for customers to find a convenient ATM away from branches.”

 

 

The 2016 Tradestreaming Awards winners: Online Banking

Online banking offerings are enjoying somewhat of a renaissance as incumbent financial players work hard to provide the functionality and experiences their customers expect.

The Tradestreaming Awards recognize the talent, energy, and vision that are required to create great digital financial products. The following are our inaugural winners in the online banking category.

Best Online Consumer Bank

Awarding the top online consumer bank or bank-like technology that touches customers, provides a rich and innovative user experience and has found a way to scale. Pure play digital banks and online arms of incumbent banks are both candidates.

chase

WINNER: Chase Mobile Banking

JPMorgan Chase has done a great job of creating one of the best online banking apps by enlisting the help of top designers and technologists. The user-friendly Chase app gives clients of the bank access to bill pay, money transfer, account management, and check deposit.

Best Online Banking Tools

Awarding the best tools that complement online banking experiences, including personal finance managers, savings apps, and similar technologies.

rbs

WINNER: RBS DigiDocs

RBS DigiDocs is the UK’s first omnichannel document solution. Customers of the bank don’t need to enter a branch to sign account docs. Instead, they can use DigiDocs to sign and return important paperwork. Internally, DigiDocs offers RBS a streamlined way to process their customers’ docs. 92% of RBS customers polled said they were “statisfied” or “very satisfied” with the solution.

Best New Entrant Into Online Banking

Awarding the most transformative and creative new offering in the online banking arena.

digit

WINNER: Digit

Digit is a fintech app that proactively monitors spending to find opportunities to squirrel money away to a savings account. After connecting to a user’s bank account, Digit saves a little bit of money every few days. Through an automated chat interface, users can transfer money out of their Digit accounts for spending on big ticket items.
Come join these award winners at our first Tradestreaming Money Conference as we explore the impact technology is having on big finance.

Chase infuses these 4 key design components into all its products

More often that not, top professionals running design and marketing in financial firms look more comfortable in jeans and a black shirt than they do in a three-piece.

As customers expect more from their banking apps, the industry has looked outside for fresh talent. These people bring with them experiences from ecommerce, media firms, and advertising agencies that are crucial for success in developing consumer-facing technologies.

“Bringing in people with fresh perspectives from outside has been very valuable for us,” said Josh Klenert, executive director of user experience and design at Chase. “Different backgrounds give a fresh perspective. We don’t just compare ourselves to others in the financial industry — we’re competing against any other app that a user has on his or her mobile device.”

This outside perspective has helped Klenert lead brands through big changes. Because UX designers place the customer at the center of their work, being an outsider forces them to ask questions and to challenge the status quo. Being new to an industry requires an empathy that drives user-centric design, peeling back an issue to frequently find a simpler solution.

Chase's Josh Klenert on design
Chase’s Josh Klenert in the firm’s San Francisco office

Klenert understands well the technology transition the financial industry is going through, because he’s one of those fresh implants. With stints at Billboard, iheartradio, and The Huffington Post, the designer has frequently found himself in industries and firms that are undertaking large transformation processes. Based in Chase’s San Francisco office, Klenert leads a division that uniquely cuts across all of JPMorgan Chase’s brands with content and design.

To work across divisions and brands, Chase created the Digital Customer Experience (dCE) team, a design organization lead by Tim Parsey with a set of principles that define its design philosophy. This document affords Klenert and his team an easy way to explain its perspective when it begins a new project.

Simple

 

Chase's simplified bill pay
Simplifying Chase’s bill pay

Chase believes in creating the simplest experience possible. One area this shows through is the recent redesign of the consumer online experience at Chase.com, simplifying the dashboard so that payments and accounts are all on the same screen, requiring fewer clicks for customers to pay bills.

Chase also recently simplified its payment app, QuickPay, adding modern touches like photos of friends and cutting down on the number of screens users need to jump through.

Personal

The dCE team at Chase tries to personalize technology experiences. For example, Chase users will see different topography on screen on the homepage depending on where they’re located and what time of day they access their machine.

“If you’re in San Francisco, you’ll see San Francisco,” said Klenert. “We’re adding humanity to the experience.”

Human

 

Chase's new mobile apps
Chase’s mobile experience

It’s here that Klenert makes use of his background in storytelling. He’s employing a friendlier, conversational tone and language in technology and messaging. Chase is trying to do away with the kind of lifeless, generic bankerspeak we’ve all become accustomed to receiving from our financial institutions. That includes meaningless technology terms as well, so in place of a login/logout button, it’s now sign in and sign out.

Cohesive

Chase’s dCE team is trying to create a cohesive experience that’s familiar across the firm’s brands and touchpoints. The designers are working towards a consistent topography and iconography across all its experiences, including at ATMs, which now also leverage local topography.

Every step of the way, Klenert and team incorporate user testing into their processes. Different projects have different scope and scale and the user testing process typically reflects that.  Chase also tries to get users involved earlier in a project — sometimes before an idea is even half baked.

“We’ll share concepts and even pencil sketches, to get user feedback early on to help shape the product,” Klenert said. “We believe we’re transforming how our customers are using digital products. It’s amazing to have the scale to get feedback from 65 million people.”

Chase Pay lands deal with Shell, access to 20 million daily customers

Chase Pay and Shell partnership

What happens when the largest fuel retailer in the US does a deal with the largest credit card issuer? It means you’ll be able to use Chase Pay to buy your coconut water next time you fill up at Shell.

Chase recently announced it had signed a multi-year agreement with Shell to accept Chase Pay at stations across the U.S. Chase credit and debit cardholders can use Chase Pay, JPMorgan’s digital wallet product, to pay at the pump as well as inside convenience stores, online and within an app.

Competing in payments

Chase’s corporate parent, JPMorgan is one of the largest payments companies in the world across all forms of payment, including credit and debit cards, merchant payments, and wire transfers. The bank’s CEO, Jamie Dimon, has famously said that he expects to win in payments and adding distribution into Shell’s 20 million daily customers is a big step forward for Chase Pay.

Dimon has publicly commented that his firm’s investments in merchant payment technology, which include Chase Paymentech and ChaseNet, should pay off “handsomely”, while the outcome of Chase Pay, which includes P2P functionality, was less certain.

“But we think that the investment will be worth it and that it will help drive more merchants wanting to do business with us and more customers wanting to open checking accounts with us and use our credit cards, ” he wrote in his firm’s 2015 letter to shareholders.

Securing distribution via merchants

Building out Chase Pay requires a delicate seesawing between supply and demand. It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem that marketplaces must contend with: consumers gravitate to payment tools if they’re accepted widely and merchants typically wait to see some traction from the payment provider before signing up. JPMorgan is inking broad distribution deals like this one with Shell and another with Starbucks to help Chase Pay adoption.

“We recognize consumers are looking to mobile solutions for everyday needs, including shopping, travel, restaurant reservations and more,” said Craig Schneider, Shell GM and Vice President of Retail Marketing North America. “Adding Chase Pay to the multiple payment methods Shell accepts will deliver a simplified, differentiated and personalized customer experience while driving loyalty.”

Distribution deals are necessary (but not sufficient) to help get users on new payment platforms. The lack of organic demand for new payment platforms has set off land grab, keeping business development professionals very busy over the next few years. On one side of the marketplace, broad technology firms, including Google, Apple and Samsung, and banks themselves, including Chase, Capital One, and soon Wells Fargo, are battling over distribution deals for their digital wallets. On the other side, large retailers like Walmart and Starbucks have launched their own loyalty and payments tools.

Using p2p to scale up

Another way for consumer payments technology to wage battle on marketplace dynamics is by propagating virally. To that end, Chase Pay can be used to pay other users, whether they bank at JPM or not. Using this new product, QuickPay, JPMorgan customers can send payments directly to one another and access them immediately from an ATM.

“Consumers expect immediate action in our real-time world,” said Barry Sommers, CEO of Consumer Banking at Chase. “That’s why we’re making this faster service available for our customers.”

The interbank hookups come via the clearXchange network, a consortium of 6 banks representing over 60% of the U.S. digital banking population. The group was acquired by Early Warning, a fraud protection and risk management company that shares critical data between 2300 financial institutions. Early Warning, itself, is owned in part by seven of the largest banks in the U.S. JPMorgan Chase joins firms like Wells Fargo and Capital One which, as part of the network, enable their customers to transact directly and immediately to their bank accounts.

Chase customers sent $20 billion in person-to- person transactions through Chase’s P2P tool, QuickPay last year. Chase Pay has a distinct advantage: its sheer size. Chase customers have more than 90 million consumer credit and debit card accounts, and nearly 24 million actively use the Chase Mobile app.

Add more A-list retailers and Jamie Dimon might very well get his winning way.