- J.P. Morgan Payments exec said the public cloud has allowed it to increase its reach while scaling back its private cloud footprint
- He added the company is also able to recruit talent from outside the traditional financial services realm
- Additionally, the exec said the cloud and the need for things like APIs are transforming banks into techcos
It’s hard to fathom just how large $10 trillion actually is, but for Jack Gibson handling that amount of money is just another day in the office.
According to Gibson, who is head of payments engineering, architecture and APIs at J.P. Morgan Payments, the cloud is critical when it comes to getting all that money where it needs to go. And APIs are making it easier than ever to make its services available to a much, much broader swath of consumers.
Gibson said J.P. Morgan Payments uses a combination of public cloud resources from AWS as well as private, on-prem cloud assets in its own data centers. He said it used to run around 50 of its own data centers but has been able to shrink that number because compute has become more efficient and it’s been able to lean on AWS to achieve the global reach it needs to be close to the customers it has across 150 countries.
“For us, it’s around cost and scale,” Gibson said of how the cloud has changed the game. “How do we do what we do without having to spin up infrastructure for something we don’t use all the time.”
For example, it doesn’t always need test and development environments. With the cloud it has the ability to spin those up and down as needed. It can do the same with assets used to provide customer services to save costs, for instance, when everyone is sleeping.
Using the cloud also “allows us to be much more surgical about how we build the back-end systems because we don’t have to worry about the front-ends as much because they’re distributed out to the edges,” he added. “If you look at Chase.com, it’s out on public cloud and it’s in many, many regions because we can put that cache close to the customer to process but the back-end is still back at the mothership.”
Data from Gartner’s “IT Key Metrics Data 2025” on public cloud spending trends across industries, the banking and financial service sector is a big spender when it comes to cloud as a proportion of revenue. The sector ranked fourth with 1.1% of revenue dedicated to public cloud IT spending, well above the cross-industry average of 0.6%.
According to IDC’s Industry Tech Path 2024 survey report, financial services respondents considered “high costs and fees” to be the biggest challenge they had with their cloud infrastructure providers (31%). And yet, the costs seem to be worth it, as 88% said the cloud has positioned them either slightly or significantly ahead of the competition.
That could be because the perks of using the cloud extend beyond the physical technology itself. As executives from Inception Health recently told Fierce, Gibson said using the cloud has given J.P. Morgan payments access to talent from outside the financial service industry..
“Every company likes to build their own thing…but you’re innovating in a microcosm of your known knowledge capital,” he explained. “The cloud gives you the ability to democratize that knowledge capital and you’re able to leverage the innovation of others to solve your problems.”
Gibson continued: “You’re also able to bring talent in because they have a baseline of knowledge that you all share. They don’t have the J.P. Morgan version of knowledge, or PayPal or eBay version of knowledge. We all have the Amazon version of knowledge, we all have the open source version of that knowledge capital and it makes it a lot easier for us to scale our human resources, the people. That’s a huge change we all take for granted a lot.”
APIs
According to Gibson, the financial services industry is at an inflection point where professionals within the sector are realizing that they’re not just providing banking services for their own institution but also the underlying technology for others to use as well.
That’s a “monumental change” in how they think about the services they provide. It is that shift that prompted J.P. Morgan Payments to built APIs and its own developer portal. Doing so not only democratized access to its payments services, but also allowed it to tap into the “engineer economy” as advocates for its capabilities.
“What I’m trying to do within payments is kind of shift from applications to systems,” Gibson said, noting tech like file transfer systems used by be built in a very siloed way. Now, though, the bank has to provide alerts, monitoring, visibility, security and more within a platform that customers consume.
“We are now systems engineers, not application engineers, and that’s a huge change. It’s a huge change in who you hire and how you think about things,” he concluded.