Gurps Kharaud:

Hi, my name is Gurps Kharaud. I'm Global Head of Equities Digital Markets. And it's a pleasure for me to be joined by Rui Fernandes here, Head of Market Structuring, formerly Head of Equities, and then Credit Structuring, and now Head of Market Structuring. Rui, good to see you. Tell us a little bit about your role and how it's evolved. And congratulations again.

Rui Fernandes:

Thank you very much and nice to see you as well. I have an equities background. I've always been in a structuring capacity at J.P. Morgan. And recently, the firm decided or asked me to run structuring across markets, which really is about creating more innovative products across the full range of markets. We are complete, we're global, we are at scale, but there's always more innovation that we can do on behalf of our clients and for our business, to bring an ever-increasing degree of customization to the products and solutions that we deliver for clients, and how we build platforms and tools to facilitate that customization that's really important. And literally, so far, has been about meeting people, getting more in the weeds of products. It's a vast world of capabilities out there, both from a product, geographic, client-type perspective. So, learning a lot, having a lot of fun, and working out priorities in the areas that we want to focus on. So, so far so good.

Gurps Kharaud:

And you've been at J.P. Morgan for a number of years. And as we've touched on, you've seen your role evolve and grow. But take us way back to when you first joined J.P. Morgan. And way back, not meant to be anything to take events of. But take us back in terms of what was your first experience of J.P. Morgan and the trading floor.

Rui Fernandes:

So, I joined J.P. Morgan in 2007. A lot has changed since then. But back in 2007, when I first came to our building, this was in London, I went through my HR induction. And as I got in the elevator to go up to the trading floor, there was a man in the elevator who looked at me and said, "Hello, good morning, how are you?" It's nice. Said back to him, "Good, how are you?" And he had a certain aura, but I didn't know to be honest who he was, until a few weeks later I realized it was Jamie Dimon. So, literally, the first person that I spoke to at J.P. Morgan after my HR induction was Jamie, which is a great introduction to the firm.

Gurps Kharaud:

Yeah. I mean probably sharing some experience with my first interactions on the trading floor. I just remember the wall of noise. And you probably noticed this as well, how the trading floor has evolved over the years. It was like people shouting across the desk to each other. And you kind of walk in as a student from the library into this area with just the noise. There's six screens everywhere. How things have changed. How do you think the things have changed in markets over the years?

Rui Fernandes:

Clearly there's a lot less noise on a trading floor, which actually I miss. I miss the noise. Noise to me is action, is stuff happening. That being said, clearly, people interact today in a variety of different ways, not just shouting across the floor to each other. There's many tools, digital tools, whatnot, for people to communicate, which works, is very efficient. But part of me still misses the buzz of the trading floor. I mean, that said, when we go around different offices around the world, sometimes the foot bridge is different, offices are smaller, the trading floors are smaller, which actually makes it more compact. So, sometimes when I go to offices like Paris or Hong Kong, versus London or New York that have bigger trading floors, there's still a buzz and the noise because people are just sitting a lot more closely together. So, it's a real variety.

Gurps Kharaud:

I always find that the one thing that you really learn early on is just how global and transverse the firm is. And I think that just with the markets businesses, in terms of from the early morning until the late evening over here. When you're sitting in London and you see all of those different geographies, regions, cultures, how do you think that we adapt to different markets in different regions? And how are we trying to ensure we give the best level of service in all of these different countries we serve?

Rui Fernandes:

I mean, in the end, we are global, we are at scale, we are complete. So, that's all great. Quite unique J.P. Morgan setup. But at the end of the day, the client needs and the business needs are also very local. There is jurisdictional specific considerations, client considerations. We try to be very adapted to the local markets. And I think we do that by having teams on the ground. And for me, specifically, as I try to go around the world trying to find new areas of growth, new innovation for products, is really trying to talk to people, talk to J.P. Morgan people, talk to clients.

And even though we are all connected globally, I still find that there is no substitutes to sitting down face-to-face in a meeting, or over lunch, or a coffee or whatever informal setting, to really try to understand the dynamics on the ground and see how we can grow our business, how we can help clients. So, personally, even though traveling can be quite taxing. Especially now being based in New York, traveling to Asia can be somewhat complicated given time zones, but there's no substitute for that. And I try to travel as much as I can.

Gurps Kharaud:

Yeah. I think I always wonder which time zone you're in at any other time, but you always seem omnipresent. But I think to that point, I think it's one thing that you've really encouraged across the team, across all of us, is to really build that personal connection. Because at the end of the day, I think people look at markets in perhaps a cold light in terms of this ruthless environment that we're working in. But really, I think the most important thing is the long-standing relationships you build, the way that you can use those built of relationships to transform product, deliver that great service to clients. And I think the one thing that we really preach in J.P. Morgan is teamwork. I mean, beyond teamwork, what would you say is one of the top skills that you need to have to succeed in J.P. Morgan?

Rui Fernandes:

I think there's a baseline of teamwork, collaboration, innovative mindset, doing what's right for clients. All these things just come naturally to J.P. Morgan, and it's part of the fabric and the culture of the organization. I would say that really a differentiator is effectiveness of communication, because people are often very busy. They may come at it from a different starting point. And being able to articulate both kind of a medium to long-term vision about what we're trying to do, but also bringing it back to the present about the journey from where we are to what we want to build, and how we're going to build that, how we're going to bring the organization together to do that. The ability to communicate effectively across different types of people, different profiles, different knowledge bases is really critical. And I think J.P. Morgan as a firm really encourages that. And I do think, from my experience, it can make the difference.

Gurps Kharaud:

And what is probably the best advice that you would give to a new, shiny graduate that's coming into our organization today?

Rui Fernandes:

I would say take advantage of the immense set of opportunities at J.P. Morgan, but at the same time excel at your job today.

Gurps Kharaud:

Sorry to interrupt, but probably sharing my experience with you. I mean, we met... How long ago is it now? 11 years ago. And it probably took over a year before I joined J.P. Morgan. But I think that, that advice really resonates. I mean, you've always said to me, "Slow down, take your time, and the good things will happen." And I think that the right areas and opportunities always open for us all. But also as well, I mean, you and I, we've seen incredible transformation over that time from in terms of the things we were working on before versus what we're doing right now, and the influence of technology in a number of these things. I mean, that's one of the primary focuses that I have in my role. How would you say that technology has changed the markets business over the last 10 years?

Rui Fernandes:

Well, dramatically, but I'm going to actually just come back to something you said. I did tell you or advise you to sometimes slow down as you think about career progression, but I never told you to slow down in terms of delivering new products.

Gurps Kharaud:

100% true.

Rui Fernandes:

That was quite the opposite, just to clarify that for the record. But I think in terms of technology, it has changed. And that's even before we start talking about AI. Even before the advent of AI. Technology, certainly in a structuring capacity. Really the biggest change has been greater availability of data. I think that has really made a difference, data at one's fingertips that allows for back testing, analytics, pricing, in a much faster way. Computational power has also changed dramatically, so things that would take a while to analyze risk scenarios, et cetera. Back testing, we're able to do that much more quickly. Ultimately, what's also changed is the ability for us to interact with each other within J.P. Morgan and clients through digital means of communication. There's so many more ways of connecting to clients, whether it's for customization, pricing, execution. And that has really been an amazing trend, which is only going to accelerate.

Gurps Kharaud:

I think what you say about the communication, I think we've really taken that dramatic journey from much conversation over the phone and then we transfer to the email, to the chats. We're trying to give clients these tools to enable them to work effectively and explore our product sets, our services, our capabilities, and then collaborate with us on the tools. As we're talking about that collaboration, and we've spoken about how we can collaborate much more on digital channels, there's almost that communication level where it's the price quote execute, versus the part that where we're looking at the create, manage, analyze, and report. How would you say that those two differ in terms of the interactions that we have? And what do you think are the top three principles between both in those sides in terms of the qualities that clients are looking for?

Rui Fernandes:

I think we often talk about the barbelling of markets and how on one end of the spectrum, markets are increasingly electronic, where clients trade through electronic means. And that's a growing trend. Really very much equities-focused in the past, and that is growing across multiple asset classes. We are very focused on that as a firm. There's also the other side of the barbell, which is typically where structuring function operates, which is more high touch in nature. By high touch, I mean creating something specific bespoke for clients.

And our mantra on that side of the barbell, and you're smiling so you've heard it many times, is customization at scale. And customization means many things, but ultimately it's the ability for us to deliver to clients a product which is specific to the clients. Whether it is a particular payoff, whether it's a particular wrapper, whether it is combining one asset class with another in a way that is bespoke and customized for that client. We believe that is a strong differentiator today and going forward.

Gurps Kharaud:

And we often have this conversation about is technology disintermediating you in terms of the service that you give to clients. Do you agree with that?

Rui Fernandes:

Well, I mean I would very gladly be disintermediated from the back and forth with clients, that, back to your question, how have markets evolved over the last 10 years? We used to exchange a lot of Excel files. I think we were happy with that. I don't think the clients were happy with that. There's got to be a better way, rather than exchanging Excel files that sometimes you don't even remember the password anymore and the links don't work.

Gurps Kharaud:

Gone over the size limit.

Rui Fernandes:

Gone over the size limit. My inbox gets too full. I have to get an extension. So, all of that, I think is something that everyone will be glad to just see disappear, certainly clients. And let's not forget, we do what is best for the clients and we adapt to the way in which clients want to interact with us. And overwhelmingly, the feedback from clients is they want to be able to affect that customization themselves. In the end, though, we are still very much in the driving seat in terms of curating how that capability looks like to make sure it's appropriate for clients. We also need to make sure that the pricing models, the data, all the engines that sit behind that front end are constantly updated, they're up to scratch, the compute works.

But we also need to make sure that it's easy to use. And financial firms, and I'm careful how I say this, but have not historically done an amazing job at creating easy to use client front-end tools. I think that's changed dramatically. And we've seen it. And thanks to the great work of your team, amongst others, I think that's really been something that I've seen that transformation over the last, call it five or so years.

Gurps Kharaud:

I think you touched on a really good point about the user experience, the client journey. These kinds of things when we were talking about them five years ago, when we were saying that we need to interview clients before we actually built something for clients, I think that that's actually a dynamic shift to what we've done within our markets business as well. Really focusing on building a product that the client wants and feels part of the journey, rather than just giving them something and say, "Hey, use it and let us know your feedback." I mean, when we first built one of our recent products, we did I would say 25 client meetings before anyone wrote any code, did any designs. And it really pivoted our strategy from what we thought we wanted versus what actually the client wanted.

And building these products with clients obviously increases their penetration that you have with them. They feel that they're owners of the products. You take them on the journey. But I would say, how do you balance the different clients in the different asset classes? Because obviously, with you in your market structuring role, you started in equities, you moved to credit, now you do market structuring, so you're cross asset. How do you think we take the approach to building these solutions, not only for clients in a single asset class, but across asset classes? And how do you think that in digital solutions we are driving the synergy such we're not building the same thing again, and again and again?

Rui Fernandes:

It's a very good question. I think in an ideal world, you would have, let's say platform homogeneity and interoperability. That's kind of like the holy grail, where basically you build the same platform for everybody. The reality is, given the vastness of our markets business, the range of products, the range of clients, really these platforms have to be very specific to the use case that clients want to use those platforms for. So, there's a natural balance, slash, conflict that we need to optimize. I think the happy balance there is where we try to create common components, whether it's a data architecture, the models, the authentication, et cetera, that goes along with these client-facing platforms and try to have common components across all platforms, but then be very specific and very diligent about the use cases that we add onto these platforms.

So, back to your point about talking to clients about what's important for them. Take Vida as a platform which you and your team have built. I think that is really a good litmus test of how to build these platforms, in that Vida is a single platform unified, but the use cases currently in Vida are very specific to the type of client and the type of product. And we find that that is the right way to encourage clients to use the platform and to stick to the platform. Then there's also the element of ongoing innovation in terms of how we evolve these platforms. So, it's not just a client feedback upfront and when we build the platforms, day one. But it's also continuous enhancement, because the market changes, client needs change.

And obviously, the best feedback we get is from clients who are engaged. We see the traffic on a platform. And I've found clients to be extremely happy to give us detailed feedback. They want to participate in the build. Obviously, they have a degree of self-interest because they want the platform to work as well as it can for them, but they're also very keen to be part of the build of these platforms. And that's been a great experience for us.

Gurps Kharaud:

When we think about the next couple of years ahead, where do you see us going as we go in these digital journeys? And I know that often I joke about you with your crystal ball. And I always think you're very good at spotting the trends. But probably an opportune time to say, where do you think we're going in the next two to three years?

Rui Fernandes:

So, I don't have a crystal ball. I wish I did. But my crystal ball is really back to the point I was making earlier about ability to communicate. And that's really what the crystal ball is, ability to communicate with clients, internally with our stakeholders, sales, trading, technology, QR, our quantitative research team. All stakeholders are very important. And ideas about new products, new capabilities can really come from everywhere. So, you got to create an environment that encourages people to participate, because they feel they have skin in the game, they are rewarded for coming up with ideas, and that these ideas importantly can go from an idea to an actual product. That's where you come in.

Gurps Kharaud:

That's when you knock on my door.

Rui Fernandes:

To make sure that things actually get delivered. And when that virtuous cycle really works, it can really work. And we've seen it, and that's incredibly important. So, the crystal ball is really maintaining that feedback loop, that culture of collaboration, and people feeling, "I can come up with ideas and see them being put to practice." I think if you look at the next two, three, five years, there's an element of just, honestly, continuing to do what we are doing well, and that's to find very concrete use cases for clients that we're not addressing today, getting the kind feedback in terms of what capabilities they really want in granular detail, and go on and build it. And I think we're only at the start or maybe halfway through that journey across the entire markets division.

I think the other thing that is harder to do, but I think it will be increasingly important, and that's the two to three, to five year time horizon you're talking about, is the idea of interoperability in a seamless way. So, the markets business of J.P. Morgan is, of course, from a trading perspective, very asset class aligned. And we've spent a number of years creating more horizontal stripes, if you will, across these different markets. Digital markets is a very good example of that. And I think that will create greater interoperability across different tools that may be built for a specific asset class, for specific client target in mind, but being able to allow clients to toggle, if you will, between one application and another in a seamless way.

Because clients themselves, be it asset managers, hedge funds, asset owners, insurance companies, financial institutions, you name it, sovereign wealth, they are increasingly becoming more and more cross asset as well. So, that is really important. So, that's one thing. The second thing, coming back to AI, is AI. So, we spend a lot of time, effort as an organization or resources in AI. I think as we pivot from utilization and adoption of AI for internal efficiency, the next version of that will be for our client business in terms of new products, new capabilities that is client facing, that embeds AI.

Now, conceptually it sounds very interesting, of course, let's do that. But of course, there are a number of challenges, and not just the actual technology itself and how do we safely embed AI into our product. There's also regulatory challenges in terms of how do we actually do that in the context of a highly regulated financial services company. We've started doing that. And I personally believe that the next three, five years we'll see a huge acceleration in that trend.

Gurps Kharaud:

Now, we've spoken about AI. Now, what about one thing that we've spoken about quite a lot internally and externally? Tell us a little bit about IndexGPT.

Rui Fernandes:

I was waiting for that. So, IndexGPT, let me start from the very beginning. So, we have within the markets organization a large, well-established market-leading business in creating indices for clients. Indices that allow clients to express a certain view. Some of these indices can be very simple in nature. Simple in the sense of being beta type or enhanced beta exposure to a certain market or asset class, and can be also more complex indices that have dynamic rebalancing, and volatility triggers and things like that. So, we have a broad spectrum. It's a growing business. We call it the strategic index business of J.P. Morgan.

As part of that business, we've always been looking at ways to enhance products for kinds. And about three, four years ago, we started adding NLP, natural language processing capabilities to some of our indices that invest in single stocks, typically in the thematic index space. That was a very successful product. Still is. But back to the idea or the notion that innovation, you need to keep innovating. You can't really stand still. Of course, the question came, well, if you believe that large language models are the natural successor to first generation NLPs, not quite, but let's just go with that for a second. Then the challenge came to us of how do we embed large language models into some of our own product development capabilities and our own index capabilities.

We filed for a trademark about a year ago. We already had an idea of a product and how we were going to deliver that. We literally then spent the subsequent 10 to 12 months refining the product. We worked a lot with our research colleagues, our AI machine learning colleagues in the firm, both research, practitioners. We spend a fair amount of time with legal compliance because back to the point about how do you deliver AI in a client-facing product, as opposed to let's say internal optimization. It brings up a whole set of considerations that we need to be mindful of. So, then a lot of time we actually spoke to clients about that product, back to the notion that a lot of the innovation comes through an iterative process with clients.

But the critical thing is this: It is really the start of a journey. Sounds like a cliche, but it's true. We wanted to cross that Rubicon, if you will, of bringing AI techniques to our client-facing index business, which we did with IndexGPT. We are creating thematic indices that are enhanced, powered through large language models in terms of the stock selection that the models generate. But the applications, the possible further applications of that are vast. Now, the speed at which we do that is a function of our own understanding of these models, client adoption of some of these models, how regulators look at AI enhanced products, what's the framework for that. We're very mindful, very thoughtful about that, but the objective is clear.

The ability for us to embed AI and machine learning techniques into our product design, into our client-facing innovation is critical. So, Gurps, you and your team have built an incredible platform, Vida, that has had a lot of client adoption, a lot of success. But if you look beneath the surface, it has a very broad range of applications from the more liquid equity markets with Delta 1, to the more, there I say it, illiquid markets in private credit with financing connect. With such disparate applications, how did you manage to build a platform that is cohesive and that has the adoption that it has with clients?

Gurps Kharaud:

Thanks, Rui. I mean it has certainly been a journey. When we began this project, we started off serving our strategic index business. And our goal was to bring a multi asset platform to our clients. And that took us over two years. And where we really began was with the client. So, we did over 20 user interviews with our clients before we wrote any code. And I think that that is really the focus that we've had as we've established these different platforms and as the Vida platform has grown over the years. The focus has been on delivering the best possible platform for the client, with the client, and really taking their feedback on board.

Now the other thing I would say that as we've grown the platform, is we've really tried to extract ourself from the singular use case of the given clients in the given asset class, and in terms of what the sales want to deliver. And actually taken a step back and said, "What are the services and what are the capabilities, and how can we use the different services and capabilities that we've already built, be that charting, be that analysis, be that different features that we could have, like back testing, and bring that to the different sleeves of the business that we serve?"

So, what we try and look at is, actually, rather than the given function, how does that fit into the theme that we have, which are four, create, manage, analyze, and report? And you'd be amazed that when you take yourself out of the actual individual use case, you can really build synergies across those pillars. And we look at that not only from the client-facing standpoint in terms of the UI and the capabilities that they have, but also in terms of the architecture that we have and the services that we build internally to be able to extract those benefits for our clients. And what that's enabled us to do is take from it taking us two years to deliver a platform, to it now being nine months. And I know it should be six months or even three months.

Rui Fernandes:

Three.

Gurps Kharaud:

But that principle we've applied. And then when you actually bring that out and you look in terms of those services, you'll be amazed at the different dots that you can connect. And then the final thing I would say is our clients are increasingly cross asset, multi asset. They're servicing their clients in a variety of different ways. This isn't something that we're delivering as J.P. Morgan and saying, "Hey, look at all these platforms underneath this one hood." No, it actually is one singular platform, four portfolio solutions. And our clients really like that. And giving them those cross-selling capabilities, i.e, that they can come in from one area, come into another area and it really look, feel the same, they're still getting that high quality experience across all of those four capabilities we provide, I think that really resonates with clients.

And you'll be amazed that when we connect dots internally, say our equity salespeople talking to our credit salespeople, you can actually connect clients on that front as well. So, when they're going into their meetings, it's not like they're bringing the new name of this new platform that J.P. Morgan are trying to bring. No, this is Veda that has been there for a long time. Delivering for clients already serves another area of the business, and then that makes adoption much easier.

Rui Fernandes:

So, tell me a little bit about the team itself. What you're describing, there's a lot of interdisciplinarity, if you will, in terms of talking to quants, talking to structure, salespeople, clients, lawyers, even, when you think about disclaimers and things like that, and how do we bring those products to clients. So, how did you build your team? And how do you think about the types of profiles that you bring to your team that you've hired over the years?

Gurps Kharaud:

I think that the nature of the job is very transversal. So, I mean, we've debated this and spoken about this a lot. It's not like I can go externally and say, "I want this profile and find me all of these different people that do X, Y, Z job." J.P. Morgan, I would say, in the space that I look after, in equities, in terms of building this team, are really at the forefront. Now, that means when you're going first, that established profile doesn't necessarily exist as a template within the market. And I think that what we've tried to do with the team as we've built it, I mean when we really started is we were about five people, and now we're at 18, is to try and look at a range of different skill sets that we've got. We've got people from operations. We've got people from technology. We've got people who have done product in different asset classes,.we've got people who were working in trading.

All of these different skill sets have come together to build this team. And what that means, I think as a core, I'm really proud of that because I think we've got a range of different skill sets. I think we've got a range of different capabilities. And that means that you can bring different levels of expertise, depending upon the product that you want to do and the region you want to do. But I think that the qualities that I really look for, and it probably sounds a bit cliche, is hard work. I think that it's really important to have a real hardworking mentality. I think that there's an ability for people to want to do more and coining the J.P. Morgan markets phrase, Do more."

Don't sit in your box in terms of what you're just delivering at this piece. Think about how it's going to grow multi-year. Where are you going to go next? That's a question I often ask. And I think the final thing is enjoy your work. I mean, we can't work that hours that we do, spend the time that we do at the firm, unless you really enjoy your work, your colleagues, your peers, the people that you work with, the projects that you're doing. Enjoy yourself. Because time that we spend in the organization, in the firm, if you're not enjoying it, you won't stay here for a long time. So, I think enjoy it, have hard work, do more.

Rui Fernandes:

So, you've been at J.P. Morgan for 11 years. If you could pick one person to have lunch with at J.P. Morgan, who would it be?

Gurps Kharaud:

I would say the one person would definitely be Jamie. Now, why do I pick Jamie? I think there's a range of different reasons. I always find that whenever he's speaking live, you really have to seize those moments to listen to him. He's so educated. He speaks about a range of different topics from what he's doing at home to what he's doing at work, where does he see the market. I would really want to spend time with Jamie, ask him all of those burning questions in terms of where does he see the markets going, where does he see things evolving. He always has great perspectives. I think he's also very worldy. And I think really the most important part about Jamie that I really see coming across is his humbleness. I mean, he has some real key ethos and values that he preaches to us internally, but also externally.

Vietta Grunberg:

I am Vietta Grunberg. I run Global Sales Product with the Digital Markets at J.P.Morgan. I'm joined today by my two colleagues, Gergana Thiel and Ben Kinney who are the Global Co-heads of Macro Sales. Welcome, guys.

Gergana Thiel:

Thank you Vietta.

Ben Kinney:

Thanks.

Gergana Thiel:

It's great to be here with you.

Vietta Grunberg:

Great to have you. So before we get into managing global macro sales franchise at J.P.Morgan and all the fun that comes with it and your experience with digital, let's start with your careers.

So Ben, starting with you, what's your background look like? How long have you been in this business?

Ben Kinney:

So I should never have ended up on Wall Street, to be clear. I'm from Wisconsin. I went to school in Philadelphia. I was pre-med in college. So this was something that was very foreign to me and about three quarters of the way through my pre-med process in school, I made the decision I didn't want to go to medical school.

Vietta Grunberg:

All right. I'm sure your parents loved that.

Ben Kinney:

Yeah, it was a difficult phone call home, that's for sure. But when I decided I wasn't going to go medical school, I didn't have a plan B and sailing is my passion, so it's a thing that I still do when I'm not at the office, whenever I can. I've been fortunate enough to race all around the world. And my plan B, which wasn't great, one, was to become a professional sailor, which at the time, this is the late '90s, I made a decision I was going to try to go to the Olympics. And as part of that path I was doing some coaching, coaching some kids, and one of the kids that I was coaching, his father was COO of one of our big competitors now, and he said, "You know what, you've got more than six brain cells, don't be a professional sailor." With all due respect to my professional sailing friends, "Come work at our bank." And so I interned in an equity derivatives trading role and within a week of the job I said, this is exactly what I want to do. I fell in love with markets.

Over the course of the summer, I realized that it wasn't the right bank for me, so I didn't end up going to work there after a summer there. It was culturally, even knowing as little as I did about markets, I could tell what was going on on the floor didn't really jive with my moral compass. So I went back to college, I went through the recruiting process, ended up at another bank, spent four years there in rate sales, which has been my background that I've worked in sales in my 25 years since graduating college. But I worked in rate sales and then in 2003 I got recruited over to J.P.Morgan to work in rate sales at JP. And I've just had an amazing, amazing path through the bank and learned a lot, had some great colleagues.

Vietta Grunberg:

That was really interesting, Ben. And Gergana, what about you? What does your career journey look like?

Gergana Thiel:

Well, Ben and I seem to have two things in common to start with and possibly many more. But firstly, we both studied in the '90s, in the late '90s, and we both fell in love with the job. The rest of the story is slightly different. I studied on Wall Street in the late '90s on the trading side of the business. I've traded foreign exchange derivatives and local market rates. Prior to that I was in Germany where I studied and coming to New York, my goal was to actually get a job in consulting because that is the number one job in Germany, at least in the late '90s. However, much like Ben, I ended up on the trading floor and I fell in love with the job. In 2000 I moved to London and in 2006 I moved to J.P.Morgan to build our capabilities in local market sales.

Vietta Grunberg:

Interesting. So you've transitioned from being in the trading seat into sales. What was that transition like?

Gergana Thiel:

That's a great question, and I don't think that it was that concerted as a move. In the late '90s, a lot of things were happening. The globalization was kicking off, a number of emerging market crises were happening in Brazil, Mexico, Russia. And being in the trading seat on a major floor in New York exposed me to a variety of risks, managing these risks, liquidity, managing the bank's position in those markets.

What else happened during that time is an evolution, the product and of the opportunity set for investment managers outside of the developed markets and into emerging markets, local markets, hot currency markets. At the time, in the late '90s, the two predominant sales forces or opportunity sets were in FX and in the Brady bonds, which were the hot currency bonds. The banks were the main participants in what was developing to be the local markets curves and the local markets as an asset class, as an investment product.

So when all of our clients started coming to us and looking at that risk, looking at that liquidity, looking at those opportunities to be involved in these markets, to access those markets for American investors, for European investors, for Asian investors, what became clear is that we need the expertise to value that risk and to intermediate that risk and to advise those clients. I had the opportunity to move from trading where I had managed those risks into sales and really develop those relationships, this strategic dialogue with our clients about the market.

Vietta Grunberg:

Interesting. Okay. So you know how they say the only thing that's constant has changed. So you guys have been in this business for some time, different backgrounds, but now obviously co-running macro sales. How have things changed when you reflect back at when you started and Ben, when you started, and even looking 10 years ago, how have things changed from a salesperson's perspective? What do you look for when you hire talent? Is it something drastically different now than maybe 10, 15 years ago?

Gergana Thiel:

I would say maybe I'll take this question slightly differently. What hasn't changed is the client is at the center of our business and what we have is a client-centered business and a people's business. I think that what has changed is the innovation in products, in technology, the evolution of the investment process, the opportunities that are out there, but the client being at the center of our business is the most important and the biggest constant for us. And where technology comes in is that we have been able to deliver our platform and our services to our clients because of the technology, because we were an early adopter, because we were and we are at the forefront of what is happening in technology and how it aids the investment community.

Ben Kinney:

Yeah, I think you hit it. The client has always been first and foremost, when we come in first thing in the morning, the last thing we think about when we leave, clients are at the center of our job. Our clients have changed, they've become bigger, they've become more complex. I remember circa 2007 hearing Jamie Dimon say, don't worry about our business shrinking, if you fast-forward 15 years, the AUM and our clients is going to double, so they're going to need us in a bigger way then than they need is now. And this was almost 20 years ago. And I think that's exactly right. Our clients have become larger, they become more complex, they become more integrated in what they do, and as a result, we've had to change how we do things as well.

So if you roll back the clock at J.P.Morgan 10 years ago, we weren't one macro sales force. We were a rates business and we were an emerging markets business, we were an FX business and a financing business. We brought all those sales teams and our trading teams much closer together. So we're thinking about the client in a more holistic way. We're driving forward with solutions. We're driving solutions as a team, not in a bunch of different silos, and now we do it globally. We've been doing that for the better part of the last five or six years where we're thinking about our client not just as a macro client in North America, but we're thinking about that client when they touch us in Singapore, where they touch us in London and Sydney and Tokyo. So I think our clients have changed a lot and we've had to evolve with our clients over that period of time as well.

You asked about what we look for when we're hiring. I used to have this thesis that we could go out and just find the smartest people and they'd be great salespeople. We could turn them into salespeople. My view on that has changed over the last-

Gergana Thiel:

Evolved, Ben. Evolved.

Ben Kinney:

Evolved.

Gergana Thiel:

Evolved.

Ben Kinney:

It's evolved. We still need to hire smart people. We can't just go out and hire people who really want to sell. We need to hire people who are intellectually curious, who they love markets, they love the work product that we're engaged in all day. But we also have to have people who like to sell and are interested in selling and interested in closing trades, getting deals done. They like that moment when the trade is hanging in the air and they're the ones who are going to go out and make sure that we win it. They're going to figure out a way to come up with the solution in that moment that our competitors aren't finding. So we need that hunger and that desire and that desire to sell that isn't necessarily, it's not inherent in every person that we're looking at bringing in.

The other thing that's changed is our salespeople need to be way more conversant technology than they maybe needed to be when I started my career 25 years ago. Our salespeople need to be engaged in data in ways that they weren't previously. Our salespeople need to be engaged in driving our tech agenda forward because they're the practitioners. Our salespeople are the ones who are on a minute-by-minute basis, living in markets, living in financial models, they're the ones who are living in trading systems and the ways we're exchanging risk. So they can't just put it off to the side and let somebody else deal with it. Our salespeople from our first-year analysts up to our most senior managing directors need to be engaged in the tech agenda and helping drive better solutions.

Vietta Grunberg:

Yeah. Look, I can attest to that. As you guys know, my team works very closely with your teams across the world covering sales, innovating, building technology solutions that ultimately automate a lot of their workflow and help our clients as well. Let's talk a little bit about that. You guys this year have taken on new big roles, co-running macro sales globally. What comes with that job? You come from different backgrounds, know SEM, rates. What comes with that job? How's technology helping you and what are some of the innovative solutions that you guys look forward to that will continue to help you drive your business forward?

Gergana Thiel:

This is something that, the answer to that question is really a build-up on what Ben already said about the relevance of technology and the ability that it gives us to reach our clients to intermediate risk, to originate risk, to be in the best position to advise clients on how to participate in the marketplace.

You said something interesting, Vietta, which is that you work with our teams to develop the products that suit the client, and that is the overarching factor. We interface the client and the market and we work with your team to provide solutions that we ourselves use and then we give to our clients so that it creates an ecosystem in which the access, the availability, the edge is there for our clients, for us, and that is what makes us stronger, and that is what allows us to bring the breadth and the depth of our offering and of our platform, which is significant.

And one more aspect I would like to mention is the global aspect of our business, which Ben touched upon, but we not only consolidated the macro space, but we consolidated our business along the global lines. So the client is represented with J.P.Morgan globally, and it makes no difference if the client is accessing us in Asia and our capabilities there or in Europe or in the Americas. We are very much in the business of seamlessly representing the client and representing our business to the client and enabling that participation.

Ben Kinney:

And I think that's a competitive advantage.

Gergana Thiel:

Absolutely.

Ben Kinney:

I think that's something that a lot of people pay lip service to and, not very humble statement here, I think we do this better than other banks. I really think that our coordination and the way that we're organized around our clients and we're driving solutions and the frequency with which I'll get an email when I walk in New York at 7:00 in the morning that originated in Asia about a client problem and their client problem started in Singapore and we've got eight salespeople all around the globe now running after this problem. I think we're really good at that.

The way technology's interfacing with our business has certainly evolved. The joke on the trading floor used to be when we were talking about how we were going to automate more and drive efficiencies more, the joke used to be that everybody was kind of vying to be the last person left on the floor, holding up the fans, keeping the computers cool, right?

Gergana Thiel:

It was like that. It was like that.

Ben Kinney:

Was going to be the last job on the trading floor. And I think everybody has now, at least in our business, gotten the joke that this isn't about getting rid of people. This isn't about how do we make our human talent footprint smaller? This is about how do we make our human talent footprint more efficient and how do we get people focused on our clients in a more differentiated way? How do we make them better with our clients? How do we help drive client solutions that maybe we wouldn't be able to run after if we were stuck in the mire of the mine-yours, mine-yours, all of the flow every day?

If we can automate that in ways where our clients still have outcomes that they're really happy with because we have to make our clients happy. But if we can do that in a way that our clients walk away feeling like, okay, I've got just as good if not better access to liquidity, and we can then take all that data and say, okay, we now understand the return on this effort. And then also pushing our salespeople in a direction where they can focus on higher return solutions. And then also driving business in such a way where we can make decisions about what we want to do because we have data that we wouldn't have had otherwise.

We can really understand the value of our business in differentiated ways. It translates in ways for our clients that they don't think would've seen 10 years ago if we weren't as fastidious about pushing technology forward and pushing on the data frontier to make sure that, like I said, we understand our business in different ways.

Vietta Grunberg:

Makes sense. Gergana, tell us a little bit about how you got started and what was your career journey like?

Gergana Thiel:

My first job as an intern was at 10:00 in the morning to go to the fax machine and collect the faxes that have come in overnight and during the morning with all different FX orders from all different clients. So the goal was to not leave any paper behind, collect everything, bring the orders to the trading desk where rates were being put in, trades were being booked, and then at 5:00 in the afternoon, I would go and fax the fills and the trade information back to the clients on the fax machine to all the clients.

Vietta Grunberg:

So things have changed a little bit since then.

Gergana Thiel:

So this is a long, long journey for the entire market, but it illustrates really how far we've gone and what technology has done for us, for the client, for the ability to look at the market, to look at the opportunity to engage and to really add value rather than be involved in the manual process of executing transactions, which are the backbone of what we do, and they are the core of the client engagement with the marketplace. But ultimately we have enabled clients to do this with ease, we freed their time to talk to their salespeople, to the traders, to the product developers as to what is next, where is the value, how can they do their best for their investors?

Vietta Grunberg:

Understood. Yeah. When I reflect sometimes on the process of building products and the role that my team plays in this ecosystem. Sometimes for my team, salespeople have no requirements because at the end of the day, sales are there to represent our clients. So when we build for sales, we're ultimately building for clients. I think that's unique and that's different. I don't think everybody does that.

I also think that one of the reasons in which our products stand out are unique and differentiating is yes, my team is sales product and we certainly build for sales, but the product only works when we bring sales, trading, QR, technology, everybody together. I would probably think my team spends more time sometimes working with our traders to make sure we understand the risk transfer from their perspective as well as we do with sales. What do you guys think of that?

Ben Kinney:

I think that's critical. Again, as we go through this digital journey with our clients, we want to make sure that their experience is as good or ideally better, and we're generally striving better. So making sure that the risk transfer process is seamless is absolutely critical. If you think about how we've built so many of our products, client zero sits on our sales desk or our trading desk, we're not rolling things out and seeing how they work to our client base, that's a risky strategy that nobody wants to take. As I said, we want to make sure that the experience is as good or ideally better, and we're not going to do that if we just throw a bunch of things against the wall in an untested way.

Vietta Grunberg:

Yeah, no, agreed.

What do you guys think are some of the differentiators that we have, our franchise has and ultimately our sales team has versus some of our competitors?

Ben Kinney:

So I mentioned our global organization before, but I think there's a few things. One, we're very fortunate to work at J.P.Morgan, and there's not a single person on our team, at least that I think, takes that for granted. We're fortunate to have our fortress balance sheet, or fortress to operate at the scale that we do or fortress to have the massive tech budget that we do to help continue to drive solutions and thinking about the next thing. But most importantly, there's a cultural ethos that is driven through the organization where people know that we're trying to run further ahead. It's not about how do we defend, the best defensive strategy's an offensive strategy.

And so I think our clients see this, that our salespeople and our traders are always hustling. And if there's ever a perception that the salesperson or trader's kind of sitting back waiting for the business to come to them, a conversation's had. We always need to be on the front foot pushing forward and showing a thoughtful aggression about our business to make sure that we are, like I said, trying to extend our lead, not looking in the rearview mirror. I think that's one of the advantages that we have.

Gergana Thiel:

I agree. I agree with you, Ben. And on top of that, I could add we are thought leaders and beyond that we are the ones who adopt best practice as soon as we can identify it. And I think that we create that standard not just for ourselves and for our clients, but for the entire industry. We are standard setters and we would like to continue to be that. We also create a forum where policy makers, clients, competitors come and really appreciate the value of the thoughts that we're bringing together, of the opportunities that we are identifying, of the way we are putting the global business together. And I think that is something that J.P.Morgan does in an outstanding way. We have best of class research franchise. We have our leadership conferences around the world and in North America specifically as well. And that is something that differentiates us to the competition.

Patrick Whelan:

Hi, I am Patrick Whelan, the Global Head of Fixed Income and Digital Markets at J.P. Morgan. I'm delighted to have Scott Lucas, the Markets DLT Head for J.P. Morgan. I've just mentioned three or four different acronyms in one sentence there. Scott, can you explain a little bit about what you do at J.P. Morgan and how you end up here?

Scott Lucas:

Sure, thanks Patrick. So Markets DLT, the market bit is easy, it sits across our trading businesses in the markets side of the house. DLT stands for distributed ledger technology, which is another word for blockchain. We really just use that as a way to build products for our clients that trade in a different way using a different technology and try and realize some of the benefits of that technology as we get into the next phase of how we think the markets are going to look.

We've been in that team for about three years. I think we built it in 2021, started to grow it through 22/23, which is a real reflection I guess, of how we've thought about what the opportunity set looks like in this space over the last few years. Before this, most of the team have come from other jobs in either markets or within J.P. Morgan. I sat in our treasury chief investment office and I spent about 12 or 13 years in that seat. Prior to J.P. Morgan, I was actually in the army, so I joined J.P. Morgan after a career in the army in 2010.

Patrick Whelan:

A natural progression then.

Scott Lucas:

Yeah, it's a pretty straightforward choice, one to the other.

Okay, Patrick, so digital markets, what does that mean for you?

Patrick Whelan:

I think markets have already digitized to a large degree. I think you look at equities, you look at FX, you look at parts and commodities and rates. So I don't think it's necessarily one thing. I think the way we envisage it is how do we integrate more of the technologies that we have already created across asset? How do we learn from the lessons of markets that have already been through the electronification journey, and how do we bring those solutions to bear in areas that are just starting out on that journey? So distribution and automation are themes that are not unique to digital markets. They exist across markets. I think we're all looking at ways to find the efficiencies within our relevant lines of business to be able to bring those themes to bear across each of our asset classes. I think the products themselves are on a northeasterly journey to towards more electronification.

If we're to look at J.P. Morgan five years from now, I think our goal within the digital markets organization is to try to find solutions that can scale to where we need to be. We always have that three to five year lens of where we want to be, not where we are today, but where we want to bring the company forward. I think the umbrella of digital markets allows us to navigate across assets a lot easier and a lot more seamlessly than we have in the past. To bring some horizontal solutions to bear, which is we look at our single dealer platform as a cross-asset solution for both equities and fixed income. We look at our API solutions directly to clients as being that broad tangible reach into all of those particular clients, EMSs and OMSs. Equally, I think the further electrification of our businesses can't happen with adding more people. We have to be able to reuse what we built and continue to provide the scale through that.

What is digital markets in the context of the broader J.P. Morgan ecosphere?

Scott Lucas:

That's a fair question. It's a bit hard because everything's digital anyway. There's very few things that have physically actually traded as far as an actual piece of something moving to another. We don't have bearer bonds in particular, in very many markets anymore. Not even much currency is physical anymore. So in that way it's a bit hard to narrow in what do we mean by digital?

The way I think about it is at the end of the spectrum that we're working at, which is really about bringing new technologies and a new type of digital to the market. So a different way of the constructing those different products, that to me has appropriated the word digital into that context. At the other end of the spectrum, the stuff that you are doing really I guess is around looking at your consolidation of data and a lot of the other newer technologies and speed of execution and that side of the house. I guess again, there's an appropriation of the fact it's digital and it's faster, newer, better, and I guess that's the work that's one of the reasons we put it in that box. That's certainly how I think about it. I don't know about you.

Patrick Whelan:

I think 100% encapsulates a lot of what we do. It's a brand that we developed over time. I think from our side, the key areas that we look at in terms of automation and digital distribution, it's not a one size fits all across the markets. Businesses, they've evolved in different ways at different times. FX has gotten to its stage of electronification a lot further and faster than let's say credit and rates and parts of rates and nonlinear rates and some of the other parts.

But they're all on the same journey and I think being able to put an umbrella term like digital markets around everything that we do helps us to build better products longer term for our clients as well as leverage the scale of J.P. Morgan and the franchise that we have to be able to deliver those capabilities to clients where they need them most, which is generally in their day-to-day workflow. Obviously we continue to evolve that space, little by little, but it's a journey for sure.

In terms of DLT, it means a lot of things to a lot of people, but from your perspective, you've highlighted a little bit about how you ended up where you did. How do you think that experience has helped you in this new role in the last couple of years?

Scott Lucas:

I think to be fair, I think it's relatively fundamental. When you look at what's happening in the broader DLT blockchain space when it comes to existing regulated products. So not crypto, separate to that. This is really about employing the technology in a way that we recognize against regulated products with sophisticated licensed participants in an existing market. A lot of the deployment of that technology in the short run is about providing efficiency and precision at the settlement end. We can do these trades today, but actually if you want to fund some of your positions and you need to have the cash available early tomorrow, you typically make that trade today and you carry that risk overnight in order to have their funds pre-positioned for tomorrow.

The way we started this team and the product we launched was an intraday repo product. A repo has been around for a very long time and trades at scale and the trillions on a daily basis, but it's trade today, settle tomorrow. It's a rolling product with term. You couldn't really go to the market and say, I'd like to do a repo for X number of minutes because there isn't a way to agree the price, execute the transaction, settle the transaction, realize the proceeds of that, use them and then do the whole reverse the repurchase side of that, do the reverse on the same day.

That's what DLT has kind of found its way into the market as a precision way of settling things and being able to enable a different type of trading to achieve a similar outcome. The treasury background's really helpful with that because clearly we look at how we fund the entities, the pricing of that, the speed of that and where the risks sit. In my last job in treasury, which was around intraday liquidity and clearly the management and risk associated with that, finding something that offset some of the risks that we didn't like. Potentially gave us some economic benefits of balance sheet saves and capital liquidity is where we kind of landed with that product. I think that's a really helpful way to start thinking about how we can use the technology in the first context. There's extension opportunities, but for right now I think that's a useful start point for how we think about deploying the technology, certainly across a range of different markets. Interestingly, there's been a lot of other follow-on products around the market that are trying to do something similar to what we launched a few years ago.

Patrick Whelan:

It's definitely been a trend that has been around for a while in terms of blockchain DLT capabilities, that kind of scope. It does feel like it's found its feet in markets more broadly now and that the next five years are going to be where the rubber really hits the road. I think we see that trend not just in DLT but in the broader adoption of technology and a bunch of different places, especially with our clients. I suppose from your perspective, when you look at the kind of client's journey to where they are today, how do you pitch what you are doing and what benefits and capabilities it can bring to them and their workflow?

Scott Lucas:

Yeah, I think with all of this stuff, it is great to have a grand vision and so this is what the market could look like and here's what we're going to go and here's the benefits that we're going to realize. There's a lot of that opportunity marketing I think around some of the stuff that comes to DLT and blockchain. If you're a cynic, it was going to solve world hunger for five years. Anything and every problem that existed blockchain could do something about. Really it can't. It can solve specific problems in specific areas. I think having a vision that people can relate to is fine and we need to set that stall out, but along the way, in order to get traction, in order to get engagement, there needs to be economics. There needs to be a reason why an investor would see the value in investing in a digital bond versus a regular bond. There needs to be value in onboarding to a platform that gives you intraday trading capabilities rather than overnight and term capability.

So we try and have that longer term vision and along the way as we deploy the technology and we get feedback from the market and we try and tell the team it's the kick over as many rocks as we can and find where the money is because in that opportunity set, you then start to really explore where it could go. We might have a vision that it'll head in one particular direction, but the market could take it into completely other one. I think our job is to at least lay out a direction, work with the market to try and realize that and along the way the market will do what the market does. You do a lot of that with what you're doing now and electronification. You're right in the heart of the storm of where that goes at the more mature end of the market.

Patrick Whelan:

How does DLT actually differentiate what we have versus what potentially competitor offerings look like?

Scott Lucas:

When you look at distributed ledger technology, one of the things that's key about that is the word distributed. Rather nostro, vostro, mine and yours, it's ours. So there's a single record that entitled folks can look at, but there's one ledger that everyone is the single source of truth. So all of this debate around what's accurate and it becomes impossible to disagree. If we can get to a place where that becomes distributed across the market at scale, then the cleanliness of the data not just within a particular institution but across institutions becomes much easier to manage. That's when you start to realize not just the potential of some of the overlays that we want to put on the consolidation of that data, but actually the reality of that without debate of we'll take that model but with some caveats or we'll apply some assumptions here because of the nature of the data and where it's from.

It's actually just a clean record and you get what you need with it. I think we're a long way from there, but I do think at either end of that spectrum there's progress on getting to a point where you can have, whether it's on distributed ledger technology or others, a cleaner record of that data and then bringing out through the shop to the end that you are working at where you consolidate a lot of that process, use it as capabilities for our clients and ourselves to be able to make better decisions. I think that's something that sits under the digital markets umbrella as we're working at both ends. I think that's pretty interesting to explore where we can take that.

Patrick Whelan:

Yeah, I think blockchain has that effect on distributing data that way. I think when we look at AI and large language models, we see that coming back together again in terms of there's a centralization effect in tech companies that have the ability to be able to process that amount of data and obviously generate those models. How do you see blockchain and DLT and AI and machine learning and how they benefit each other and also how they can help each other grow?

Scott Lucas:

That's a really good question. I think to be fair that they're probably going to grow independently for a while and in a way I quite like the focus on AI at the moment. It takes the focus of blockchain, it means we can get on other jobs without so much, so much light shining on us, but I do think-

Patrick Whelan:

The light's coming back by the way.

Scott Lucas:

Yeah. But I do think the opportunity set, as long as we keep that aligned and we know that that exists and we know that in the longer run that there's a better opportunity by bringing both those things together. One of the things that always comes up around DLT and blockchain is like because of the way that it works, particularly when you come back to some of the funding trades, you might need to pre-fund some of these things. The on-rails, off-rails of different cash legs, et cetera, and that is one of the hurdles to being able to execute at scale because we get a lot of value out of netting your T plus whatever. You can do a lot of that. I think as it grows, bringing some of these models that already exist today, whether it be netting algorithms or whether they be some other algorithm that looks at how you bring a body of work together, settle those effectively and spit them back out into an execution platform.

They're the sorts of models that will be good to be able to transform into something that's available to deploy in DLT. So you still get that very precise and what I like to call atomic settlement. For me it's delivery versus payment, but whatever, I think you can get that in a way that relies on some of this more advanced models that are available today and getting better. Bring that into DLT, think the DLT settlement process will be a beneficiary of that first before there's a scalable set of data that then brings into a more advanced and developed set of models. The AIML side of the spectrum.

Patrick Whelan:

I heard a good quote which was today's science fiction is tomorrow's science fact, and one of the things they mentioned was smart contracts and how we look to tokenize more of our life. In an ideal world, we love the power that AI can bring to so many of our day-to-day tasks, the co-piloting from a developer perspective, even to helping with emails and various different forms of communication that we have to actually try and summarize large amounts of information quickly and it can just speed up your day so much more. Somebody just showed this view where essentially you were born with a smart contract, that smart contract was essentially yours when all your data and eventually it learns with you as you grow and it becomes like you are the one who ultimately has the power to say where or how your data gets used over time, but you have this co-pilot with you for life.

It's a bit dystopian in terms of where it goes after that, but it is an interesting point in terms of the benefits that DLT and blockchain can bring from a security perspective. When you have that amount of data that you want to train models on, you're able to do that in a way that can keep some of the data private while at the same time getting some of the benefits that large language models can give you in terms of being able to provide that efficiency and scale.

How do you look at it from your perspective in terms of where do you think it can go from here in terms of today's science fiction becoming tomorrow's science fact? I think that's a bit of a step too far, but I think in our world we see it in the loan market, we see it what you've done in munis today in terms of there is digital issuance, there is digitally native bonds already in existence. We're already seeing the issuance process changing in terms of where the debt capital markets, which are the envy of the world in the US are something that are evolving today. We see that both in Europe and in the US in terms of the embracing of these digitally native bonds. Where do you think it goes from here?

Scott Lucas:

First of all, we need scale and that will come through one route or another. It'll take time, but it'll come through one route or another. But scale will come because people start to see the benefit and it becomes a bit self-fulfilling. So if you can demonstrate through execution what that potential looks like, then I think people start buying into that model. So what do I mean by that? I think there's a bunch of different ways that this could develop. If you think about how a digital bond can be managed and serviced versus a regular way bond, that principle of it's a shared ledger, it's a single record rather than lots of different records. I mean the point I made before, it becomes impossible to disagree about what that data point is because there's only one record of that. That is the record that everyone sees.

That starts to remove the overhead of people checking. If you move the overhead of people checking everything along the way, then you can speed things up. So you think about an existing fixed income instrument that pays coupon on a semi-annual annual basis. We do that for a couple of reasons. One is because traditionally people used to tear strips off and post them away and then get their cash and then check that and reconcile it. That takes a while. Now it's because there's so many of these instruments out there and you've got to check them all. That overhead takes a reasonable amount of time. You don't want to be doing that a high frequency basis, but if you don't have that check because you've got the single record and you can calculate coupon to the second because it's just math. You can get your clean and dirty price, you can change the frequency of the coupon payments. You can pay daily, weekly, monthly type coupons. It starts to provide a different range of opportunities for those instruments look like. That's one set of opportunities.

You could start bringing the interest rate swap. You bring that in to the smart contract and say, well actually I'm going to issue a bond fixed. I'm going to put a swap in for floating. The issuer is going to step out of that. The bank can manage it. You have the same transparency, the same accuracy, the same reporting, but a fewer cash flows. Actually you take some operational risk out and you also open the door to a bunch of companies that are sophisticated enough today to have a well-trained high-cost finance department to manage the accrual accounting and the associated cost of doing business to issue a bond. They can now get into that space and it starts to do what capital markets are supposed to do, which is get wider and deeper and bring more capital to let companies grow in a different way. That's an opportunity.

Over time as we get more sophisticated in how they can be deployed, what the inputs for those are and how available they are, and there's a lot of streaming prices and streaming information which is about capturing the right stuff and the right way to feed into those contracts, then I think we get to start to really realize the value of that. But that will take time to get there because each one of those decisions takes people to take real risk. We talk about all these projects and you do a digital issuance or you do, we do this for a reason. The city of Quincy did a municipal issuance because it needed money for pavements and roads, not because they wanted to do a digital issuance, but they actually needed the money. All of these things have an outcome. That's real risk that the investors take on behalf of the issuer. It takes on behalf of actually putting it in the platform.

So to build that scale, you've got to do that incrementally to make sure people are comfortable with that risk and they can see it and agree it and feel good about doing that on behalf of their [inaudible 00:19:28] liquidity providers. We didn't leap from paper ticket trading to algos in a single muscle movement. That's a journey. This'll be the same.

Patrick Whelan:

Look, we've been on that journey for a while in our space and obviously it's one that we see the same footprint in terms of where we're headed, but at the same time, it's not that easy to necessarily disrupt and innovate traditional markets that have been that way for a long, long time. It was interesting to read about the Quincy bond in Massachusetts and the benefits that the legislators in the town felt they could get from the digitally native issuance. One, they could track where not only where the dollars were coming from but also where the dollars were going to go. So if you're a voter in that town, it's an easier and more complete way of tracking some of where that funds are actually going to get spent. It's going to be, as you said in your schools on your roads, you can actually feel like it's getting, you can track that value over time.

I do feel like it's an exciting time I think for digitally native bond issuance. It's not the only area I think that you're looking at in terms of it's the one that probably garners the most headlines at the moment, but it's probably not the only piece.

Scott Lucas:

We saw on Investor Day, Jamie spoke about all the interns coming in this summer are going to get AI training. We do a lot of that anyway. How do you deploy that? How do you think about that from your team training and people, et cetera?

Patrick Whelan:

Yeah, I think there's variations in terms of the forms of training that we're looking to give our analysts and associate populations as well as new interns. We've started to harness the skill sets that our analysts and associates have coming out of university. Most people have some form of Python training or some form of development skills that they've learned through courses in university. We want to make sure that they can harness those skills and put them into action once they join. So we've partnered them up with engineers in technology to help them get through some of the security and set up to get an actual piece of code up and running and actually working in production. I think if we don't start having more eyeballs on more data sets and continuing to clean it up, the points you've referenced before in terms of how do we actually get to a point where these large data sets are something we can train our models on, they'll never be clean enough and we'll always have issues.

We'll have the problems that are inherent in a lot of these large language models today in terms of bias and various other things. So we have to keep continuing to clean that data set, continue to deliver those insights, continue to find innovative ways of delivering those solutions to our clients and ultimately to harness our own data and actually use it better. So I don't think we've got it perfect yet, but I do feel like it has gotten better. As I said, more not just analysts and associates, I think we've seen more seasoned practitioners start to dust off some of their own developer skills from alongside the use of co-pilots like GitOps and LLM.

Scott Lucas:

It is complimentary. In order to ask good questions and build good models, they've got to know the products and feeds itself a little bit. When we talk about that, what are the sorts of things that we can see that we can deliver to when it comes to data analytics that are available for clients now that we've already built? Because it's not all future. We've got a lot of capability now.

Patrick Whelan:

Yeah. So on our single-dealer platform on Execute, we have our own Execute analytics product, which allows us to look at things like TCA reporting for clients on how our algo is performing, the heat map of market structure that we see across particular asset classes throughout the day. We see more volumes in the morning and into the close. We see it's aggregated and anonymized, so it's not necessarily client's data, but it does tell clients a little bit about the flows that we are seeing. We also have solutions that are a little bit more greenfield in terms of how we're developing them, where we're giving traders the ability to develop their own interfaces and UIs to be able to access some of that data and actually present better tools initially to salespeople so that they can actually see what the traders want them to see. They're actually producing the data sets themselves, but with a view that they can eventually deliver those to clients as well.

Scott Lucas:

We can't do it all ourselves. We've done some investments, we've looked at investments with you, we've looked at a range of different things. It is not just J.P. Morgan doing this, this is the market doing this. When you approach how we think about partnering or investing, how do you think about that and how do you think about bringing some of the stuff around our own approaches internally around data analytics, but also just workflow and bringing liquidity to the market into that conversation when you're looking at who we should invest in, who we should partner with, et cetera.

Patrick Whelan:

Yeah, look, I mean all the data analytics in the world, if it's only built up on our data set, is only going to be so useful to a client. They want real-time streams from us. They want pre-trade data.r They want the analytics from us, but they also want to see aggregate data from our competitors. They want to be able to harness what our competitors are sending them at the same time. So some of that obviously leads to discussions around how can we bring better solutions to bear in the market that ultimately solve client's problems better? I think that's something that has required us to work with our competitor firms to create solutions ultimately that either we can strategically invest in, that we can partner with an existing FinTech to help scale what they've already built so that ultimately we can provide that type of solution across assets or across the markets to a larger population of clients than we can necessarily get through our own single-dealer offering or through our own individual efforts.

So when we look at it, we generally look at it from, there are a number of principles whenever we get involved in strategic investments. I think every firm makes their own decision, but every one of us is trying to increase competition. We're trying to improve the transparency, improve the digitalization of workflows so that there's more automation, it's easier to do that. The scale that we need for the future is something that we can bring to bear with our clients. A lot of times you need a partner.

Scott Lucas:

The bit that I do find interesting is, and it's a bit of a privilege, I think working in digital markets and in J.P. Morgan because the strength of the crossover and knowledge coming back to the training around data analytics, markets, products, AI, ML, there's a very strong fin and tech component that works together. Whereas outside the firm, I think there's quite often pretty small fin, big tech in some of these and you need those complementary skills. But I think that's something we can also help as we make some of those investments evolve and bring some of those companies into a way that they can be more market useful.

Patrick Whelan:

I do feel like it's one of those areas you got to try and try and try, and then every now and then you'll find one that works. Not all of them will work, but as you said, and you're right, in terms of J.P. Morgan, we have the luxury of being in this seat to be able to navigate across so many different parts of that potential investment criteria that we would look to want to invest in a company. We're able to do the diligence, we're able to bring the power of the firm to bear by having lawyers, accountants, technologists, everybody look at potentially why this one might make sense. It isn't just one person's decision a lot of times. It's not something that happens overnight and it takes. We did one recently, it took two and a half years to get to market in the end, and it'll take four to five, six years to fully bear fruit.

But as you said, if we weren't in that position continually challenging ourselves as well as our clients and our partners across the market to continue to push, to innovate, to disrupt, to change things, I don't think we'd necessarily see the outcomes that we have in the past. I think being involved in electrification, the e-trading journey has lent itself to, as you said, the crossover of fin and tech in that sense. Ultimately we've helped accelerate a lot of these platforms' growth over time, and they've all helped broaden that network, increase that network-centric effect, but we continue to have to create competition otherwise it will stagnate.

So I think that is something that we continue to focus on. I don't think it's necessarily a one size fits all. I think some of the smaller ones have actually worked out better in a lot of cases because they're more targeted in particular areas. We've seen it in loans in both Octaura and Versana, even in the primary site in direct books, these kinds of consortium-led ventures can lead to improved digitization, improved workflows over time, but they take time and money to get going. But as you said, hopefully over the next few years we'll start to see some of the benefits of those. If I was to parachute into your team tomorrow, what would be the common conversations? What are people talking about the most? What are they excited about?

Scott Lucas:

I think, what next? It's a similar thing to across, and actually I was chatting to one of the associations this morning. They was saying, okay, so we've done Quincy, what next? He was talking about the fact that there's this a bit of almost a post-execution, oh god, now what are we going to do? Kind of feeling around it. There are other people across digital markets have thought when they've launched products, it's the same feeling. That I think is the next question. Okay, so we've done one thing, we want to do another thing. Where do we take it? How do we get there? I like that because it's very much a forward-looking appetite rather than the rear vision mirror. It wasn't that great. I think that's very much the conversation in the team at the moment. They're thinking about, okay, that's a baby step.

How do we turn into a bigger step and a bigger step and to the point you ready for, it's called work for reason. It's tough. There's a lot of things you've got to work through in order to execute and for good reason. It comes back to everybody asking people money on the table. They've got to have confidence in us and the team, the technology and the legal rules, et cetera. So I think they enjoy that challenge and they're looking forward to the next one. Certainly I am, and I think that's certainly where our focus is, but that's just brand new stuff. I mean, when you come back to the broader fixed space, there's a lot of different products in your area. If you're going to pick one, which is your favorite?

Patrick Whelan:

I came from credits, I would definitely lean on that one probably more than anything else, but it has been the one that's had a lot of focus in the last few years as well. It's gone through probably the most significant change. The disruption that you talk about, that entrepreneurial spirit is not just unique to digital market. We see it in salespeople, we see it in trading, we see it in our technology teams, in our QR teams across the board. That spirit is there, it's about harnessing it and actually giving people that outlet to continue to try and change the business.

So I do feel like if I was going to pick one, it would be that. But I feel like the bit that probably the fixed income lens has given me more than anything else is the ability to look across the businesses and see, as you said, some of the synergies that exist to be able to say, okay, we were looking at a direct connectivity with clients and we have this ongoing target of a path to 25% whereby we're trying to get 25% of our electronic volume being done directly with clients via our API in both credit and rates and commodities. So we've started to see the effects of being able to do things on a standardized basis, giving people targets and objectives that work across asset.

They are addressed differently from the business problems underneath. But ultimately we're trying to meet clients where they want to be met. They don't want to talk to 10 different people about the same thing. They just want to get access to our pre-trade data as efficiently as possible. They want to execute with us and they want to be able to do that as efficiently as possible. So we have to make that as seamless and frictionless as possible. I think that piece in terms of providing that scale horizontally, when I look to my broader team, we keep asking them for ways to not just do the first thing in a greenfield site, but how do we create reuse? How do we get to use it again and again and again and be able to scale that across the various products within fixed income and still provide the solutions the client wants?

So that one I think is one that's probably most common. I think the second one is metrics. How do we measure success? How do we look at our success through that lens and say, okay, can we quantify what it is we've done? Obviously something like the path to 25%, it's pretty clear. It becomes a catchphrase for a lot of people to say, okay, it starts to become something that we can all get behind and start to help people achieve. I think people like those objectives. They like clear targets, they know what it means, they know the benefits that it can bring. If we do our job well and execute well, yeah, we can bring that to bear across a number of different asset classes. I suppose turning it back on you, what are the things that are most likely to drive people in terms of their objectives?

Scott Lucas:

We've got long-range and short-range. The long-range vision of how we think things might play out. I think people are comfortable with, and it's been pretty well articulated across the market by most people that are in the market. They've all got a very similar landing point. The question really is how we navigate to get there. For us that's about being able to work in both of those gears. The short-term stuff is really about just kicking those rocks over and finding the trades that make money in the short run that demonstrate both the value and the investment we're making. We should continue to make that investment. But actually continue to reinforce the longer term value of why the technology and the capabilities we're bringing to bear than the market have even bigger value across a range of different use cases.

So Patrick, let's pretend we don't know each other for a few minutes. So give me a bit of background, like your first memory of the trading floor.

Patrick Whelan:

That's a good one. It's been a while. I've been at J.P. Morgan for 18 years now, but my first day at J.P. Morgan was getting a tour of the trading floor and just being hit with this wall of sound that ultimately just invades your senses from so many different angles. There's hoots and phones and back then there was a lot more hoots and phones. I think these days it's a bit quieter, but it's still fairly loud. There's still an energy about it that when you first encounter it, I was talking to one of our analysts that has recently joined, and they're still buzzed by it. They're just excited by the fact that it's 6:15 in the morning. This place is one of the busiest places you're going to come across. There's floors galore that are empty, but the trade floor, there's people there, people are going. It quietens down a little bit later on in the day, but it is definitely one of those places that does have an impact, I suppose. How about you? What's your earliest memory?

Scott Lucas:

It was a bit weird for me. So I joined from the army. It was a very different experience. Left outdoors all the time wearing uniform. Everyone looked pretty much the same.

Patrick Whelan:

Just the same, then.

Scott Lucas:

Yeah. It's pretty much the same. Instead of gillets and like a long sleeve shirts, it was camouflage. But I think one of the earliest memories I saw, I joined the chief investment office. Very early on in the canteen on that floor, one of the traders had a KitKat Chunky and a regular KitKat. He was doing a quick calculation of the price versus the weight of those chocolate bars. I was like, this guy makes a pretty good living and he's figuring out the value of something that's worth 75p. So it was a pretty interesting insight into the mind of someone who's making those risk decisions on a daily basis. But it was very different to the sort of, I guess, risk decisions I used to make in my previous career.

Patrick Whelan:

How did you make the transition from the army to a financial company?

Scott Lucas:

So I took a year to do an MBA. It was helpful. I grew up in Australia. I was in the British Army, so a few years in the Australian Army, a few years in the British Army. I didn't have a network in the UK outside the army. All those people that caught the training into London and sat in front of the computer screen, I didn't know what they did for a living. I didn't know what a salesperson did, I didn't know what a marketer did, I didn't know what an accountant did. So I took the year to figure out what do people do for a living and what do I want to do?

Patrick Whelan:

I'd still like to know what they do for a living.

Scott Lucas:

It's a fair point. But it was interesting to get a bit of context around that. Then through that process, met some people who'd been in different financial services firms, some people from J.P. Morgan came up and did a few different briefings. Just met a few folks and thought it sounded like an interesting area, interesting company, and eventually navigated my way into the firm in 2010.

Patrick Whelan:

It's quite the journey. Mine was slightly different. I joined in technology and technology has always formed a backbone to my career. I started out in production management and got a broader view of all of the different systems that traders used on a day-to-day basis. It was a good foundational growing area because whenever anything went wrong, you were the first person people called.

I transitioned later towards, and somebody once told me that you'll have 10 different careers in a 20-year career because each one will be different. I think that is the thing that J.P. Morgan gives you is that opportunity to continue to change your career path even within. So I spent two years in production management, I then became a developer, business analyst, the risk and analytics side, moved into the credit trading space and kind of credit exotics and hybrids pre-crisis. It also still had a strong technology lens through it because we had to continue to evolve the tools that we had available to us and then continue to move through to today where basically I wanted to find out more about, I felt like I knew enough about technology at that point that I developed a network that was broad and deep enough to want to find out more about how exactly the credit business operated.

I moved into our business management COO function and started to figure out a little bit more about the broader businesses that underpin that particular asset class, but always with a technology lens again. Technology was a driving force to what credit wanted to do, what we wanted to do in credit over time, which was we just started to see ETFs come into the space. We were just starting to embrace e-trading and that's where I moved into e-commerce and digital markets and started to develop a stronger lean towards how do we automate more of what we're doing within credit? How do we leverage what we've done in FX and rates and bring it to bear in an asset class like credit?

I think ETFs has been an area of focus for the firm more broadly and is one of the areas that we're probably most proud of in terms of what we've done in the last few years. It's not just one asset class. It is commodities, rates, credit as well as equities. It is about bringing all of those underlying asset classes onto a similar technology framework to be able to price them efficiently, to be able to not necessarily break them down into their individual business lines and treat them differently, but to be able to service our client base in the ETF space more broadly. They want the complete package. They don't want only a partial solution from rates or a partial solution from equities. They want to be able to look at ETFs across the board and trade whatever they want.

So we had to develop in partnership across the firm, a solution that worked in every area. Then obviously that was with a view to obviously our market share at the time was not where we would've liked it to be. There were gaps in terms of our offering to clients and we try to close those as quickly as we can. I'm glad to say we have managed to close a lot of those gaps. We're not done. We're a lot closer to where we wanted to be and we're closer to being the top bank in this space more consistently across asset, which is where we want to be. Obviously we want to move into the top two consistently going forward.

Scott Lucas:

You don't need to move on to business to do that. You don't need to move seats or teams to do that, but it's certainly something that seems to come up a lot in the conversations. Do you hear the same thing? There's appetite from mobility.

Patrick Whelan:

There definitely is. I think it's something that I think we embrace as well in terms of not just in digital markets, but in J.P. Morgan. A lot of people start their careers in sales and trading. We talked a little bit about more people wanting to leverage the data analytics skills that they've had in university and want to put them into practice.

Traditionally, that wasn't something that could have happened, right? So they would've had to move roles or move technology or move firms. I think what we're trying to do more often is, to your point, create those challenges, give people the opportunity to own their career and the direction they want to take it and continue to provide choice in that journey. I don't think any of us want to lose people. It's probably the thing that we love about the company the most. It is one of the questions that was going to put back on you in terms of what motivates you. I know for me it is the people, it is the network, it is the teams. It's the ability to work with so many extraordinary people all the time and continue to challenge our own ideas to disrupt within as well as to look to disrupt the broader market structure and industry as well. So I do feel like it's the people more than anything else that gets me out of bed in the morning.

Hussein Malik:

Hi, my name is Hussein Malik and I'm Co-Head of Global Research at J.P.Morgan. I'm glad to be joined here today with my colleague, Asif Mohamed, who's head of Digital Product for Research.

Asif Mohamed:

Great to be here, Hussein. Thank you. Research is ranked number one. We're ranked number one in research. What does that really mean for our clients in the market?

Hussein Malik:

What that really means is that we have incredible depth, breadth, and quality of research. Research is the first leg of the trade cycle, and what we are really trying to do is give great insights to our clients about economies, markets, and companies. We have research coverage over six continents. There's 55 countries where we do economics, markets, or company coverage, and we have about 5,000 companies that we cover on an active basis. So really putting all of that together makes us the number one franchise in research.

Asif Mohamed:

That is amazing. In terms of coverage, tell me more about what you mean by the scope of coverage and why that's so important.

Hussein Malik:                                                                                                           

I think it's really important to think about the scale of research. Every day we produce between 400 and 500 pieces of content that we send out to our clients. In an average year, we attend or join or lead about 80 to 90 conferences per year. We do hundreds of road shows, we produce a lot of content, and we make sure that that's delivered to our clients in the best possible way.

Asif Mohamed:

So there's a vast amount of research that's being produced every day. How are clients finding and actioning those research pieces? I presume there's lots of research out there. We're a leader in the industry, and so how are clients actually finding and receiving that research?

Hussein Malik:

Well, most clients still receive research in email. We send a lot of emails every day. That number is well over a million emails that we send out every day, and clients ultimately do need to search through that content to find what they want. So what we're trying to do is help them find it faster. And I do think that with the great increase in the amount of content available to clients, they are and will continue to use machines to do that first level of filtering to help them find the content that they're really looking for. But let me talk about delivery because this is really in your wheelhouse. We obviously produce the content and we get it to our clients. How do you think technology is changing that path? How does that come into play?

Asif Mohamed:

Yeah, that's absolutely right. We're using lots of different technologies in the delivery of our content, the large volumes of content that's created across various markets, as you described, and with our various asset classes, we have a tremendous amount of technology in play to deliver that content to clients. And so we've created this capability that allows them to discover and select their subscriptions effectively. And so as the content's being written, it's contextually mapped to their interest and they're able to receive that content over email. You mentioned 1.5 million emails, but there are also other channels that clients are consuming our research insights on, such as the web. We have the J.P. Morgan Markets portal, mobile, and they also use some of the popular aggregators in the industry to consume content. Now, content's also being integrated into their workflow and their processes, and so we are delivering content via electronic formats. You speak to clients every day. What are you picking up? What is the insight about the client consumption of research insights? How is that changing over time?

Hussein Malik:

I think today it's still, as I mentioned, a fair amount of email, but podcasts have become more popular in certain parts of the world. Videos have become more popular. We are doing more multi-analyst conferences or conference calls where people are listening in very large numbers. So they're using different channels to consume content. Where I think they are going is using tools like LLM to curate content, broadly speaking, faster and easier for them, to be able to hone in on what they really need to focus on.

Asif Mohamed:

Yeah, that's right. It's more than email, obviously, and we create subscription systems similar to some of the modern media companies have done for allowing clients to subscribe and personalize their content. So they're able to go into a subscription system on a real-time basis and make adjustments to the content that they'd like to receive. So they're able to search, discover, subscribe, change those interests on a regular basis for their needs, as their needs change.

Hussein Malik:

And what about things beyond email?

Asif Mohamed:

We have the J.P. Morgan Markets portal, which is a large platform, and we provide content on the web. We provide content in mobile form factor, as well as through aggregators. And the search, as clients are able to come and search, we do quite a bit of curation of that content. And so all these technologies are being employed to deliver content to the client the way that the client wants it, with all of the modern capabilities and expectations, and the expectations are changing. And so we are changing the technologies, we're moving to the cloud in many ways and using the latest and greatest capabilities to deliver content to clients. So Hussein, how do you change the content creation process, or how does the content creation process change to address these user expectations?

Hussein Malik:

Well, content creation when I started my career was really printing out copies of research and distributing the hard copies. And obviously, that's changed. It's moving to a digital world and it needs to get more digital as we go along. And it's all very important to do that in order to be able to componentize the content, that we have to enrich it with better metadata to make sure we can tag it correctly, and then we can deliver it in more automated fashions and curate it much more than we are able to do with that today.

Asif Mohamed:

So Hussein, tell me a little bit about how data is being consumed in research.

Hussein Malik:

Well, data is the backbone of research. So research has always been about data, and with better technology, data storage, and computer available to us, when we think about it, we are using more data-driven analysis to drive our content and to make sure that we are getting to those conclusions that we couldn't get to earlier in the time that we could. What that does mean is that we need to deliver this data to our clients better than we were ever able to. And we need to make sure in a way that data is coming out from behind the curtain and it becomes a form of content that we are delivering. What that doesn't change really is still the importance of the person who's coming up with the data, the analysis, talking about it and explaining the importance of that when we talk to our clients.

Asif Mohamed:

And how does artificial intelligence influence the way that we're creating content?

Hussein Malik:

There's a lot of hype and there's some reality, and I think there'll be more reality as we go along. But we have been using AI, or broadly speaking, AI, specifically NLP in our research for a long time, but with the greater availability of GenAI and LLM tools, there's a lot of focus on this, and we are able to do things today that we were not able to do in the past. So we are able to process a large amount of data very, very quickly and produce an output that at times can be quite auto-generated in terms of the analysis in a short period of time.

One example of that is what we're doing with Central Banks Speak, where we have managed to train our system to understand what central banks are communicating, doing it at a very granular level, and we are able to get that output to our clients in a matter of minutes. In addition to that, we have put a lot of these tools out and made our tools available to clients, and I think you know probably more about that than I do, so maybe I'll turn this over to you to talk about that.

Asif Mohamed:

Yeah, we're using AI in a number of places, and we've used natural language processing technologies for a number of years now to deliver investable AI, a portfolio of products that use natural language processing to analyze the news, earnings call statements, and analyst reports to deliver thematic information and sentiment information for actionable investment insights. And so that's one of the areas, we're also using it to deliver dashboards for our clients on economic indicators that are almost real time and now casters and those kinds of things. So we've deployed natural language processing technology in developing data products for our clients, whether it's in equities or economics, and we're moving towards the use of large language model capabilities to enrich those data products. We've developed a number of data products using natural language technology, and we have developed a page on our portal that has all of those capabilities. So for example, we've got a product called SmartBuzz, which looks at themes and sentiment across a vast amount of news, earnings, call transcripts, as well as analyst reports.

Hussein Malik:

And clients can use it?

Asif Mohamed:

Clients can use it on a daily basis to understand and make investment decisions on those capabilities. And so a vast amount of data, alternative data, we have a number of macroeconomic type of indicators on that page as well. So it's a portfolio of products that uses natural language processing technology to consume large amounts of data and generate insightful signals for clients to consume. So Hussein, what are your views on how J.P.Morgan research is differentiated in the industry?

Hussein Malik:

Research is obviously about content and delivering content, but the content has to be there and the content is driven by first and foremost, people. And we have great people, we have a complete organization. And I think what makes us really powerful is that we work together as one research group to deliver the insights to our clients in ways that a siloed organization really cannot. And that's what I think is really the power of our research franchise.

Asif Mohamed:

That's great. And in terms of innovation, build versus buy?

Hussein Malik:

Historically, research has tended to have a bias, and I think generally Wall Street has had a bias towards building things themselves, and I think many times that's still the right answer. But with the great expansion in the number of capabilities available, what we used to call FinTech more than we do now, it at times makes more sense to buy technology, partner with technology to create the products that you have. And in some cases, we've even built some partnerships to create the content that we are producing that tends to be a little bit more data type content, but we are exploring all of those options to make sure that we remain cutting edge in what we deliver to our clients.

Asif Mohamed:

So these are a very comprehensive set of capabilities that the firm has with the injection or infusion of technology, innovative technologies and modern evolving technologies. What haven't I asked you about, that you'd like our clients to know?

Hussein Malik:

Well, the research is for them. So I think the number one thing I'd like our clients to know is that we are listening to them, we are producing this content for them, and we want to know what we are not doing for them. How can we do that more? How can we integrate our offering more? And that's one of the reasons we built the markets client portal, for example, to bring together what we're doing in research with what we're doing in sales and trading and make sure we can deliver that in an integrated fashion to our clients.

Asif Mohamed:

So Hussein, what are we focused on for our clients and the market?

Hussein Malik:

Well, we're constantly looking to see where the new opportunities for our clients lie. So I think if you go back a few years, we really have built a top notch effort of research in China, for example, where we cover a number of companies locally, and then we do it a little bit with a greater China focus in Hong Kong and Taiwan as well. Currently, India is a big focus for us. We definitely think that there's an opportunity for our clients to invest in India with the growth with the friendshoring and some of these dynamics. So it's another area in which we are quite focused, and we continue to do that, both in terms of countries opportunities, asset classes, and make sure that we are there where our clients are going to go, and continue to offer them the same level of advice that we would in the developed or established markets.

Asif Mohamed:

So Hussein, how has research evolved over the years since you've been involved in research?

Hussein Malik:

At the beginning of my career, I used to spend some time typing numbers into Excel because that's how the market data used to come in. That's obviously changed a lot. We wrote research and we published it and we distributed it in hard copy. That's changed to electronic distribution, but I think as we look ahead, it's going to become more and more digital distribution of content, and that's really the evolution. And then ultimately, it'll be data feeds and to a certain extent, machine to machine. But what won't change, in my view is really the people behind the content, the people delivering and explaining and talking about the content.

Asif Mohamed:

So the machines are going to be more prevalent in the consumption of content going forward, you think.

Hussein Malik:

As a first level of filtering, I do believe so.

Asif Mohamed:

Thinking back about your younger self, is this where you imagined you would be today?

Hussein Malik:

Imagined, no. I did hope, maybe, yes. I did start in research. I worked in research for 12 years. I left research for 13 or 14 years and then came back. So for me, it's been a roundabout journey to come back to research. That journey's all been around the investor clients, so I think that's been the common thread through all of it. But I don't think I would've imagined being here if you had asked me, and maybe I would've said, "I hope to be there." But I think it's a long road and a lot of things you learn along the way. What about you?

Asif Mohamed:

Yeah, no, I would not have imagined it. I started out in a very different discipline. I was an engineer and then I transitioned into the capital markets, and so I'm obviously very interested in innovation and transformation and those kinds of things, and so I've kind of found my way here, but it's not something that I imagined from early days. I certainly enjoy what I'm doing and it's challenging, but really love that.

Hussein Malik:

I do remember calling you one day about five years ago, Asif, and saying, "I have an idea."

Asif Mohamed:

Yeah, and you actually had to convince me, right, of that idea?

Hussein Malik:

Yeah, I really felt that your ability to understand what the FinTechs were doing and what people were doing and applying it to a different space and being able to articulate and deliver a vision was something that we could really use in research. And frankly, what we have accomplished in research in terms of the digital journey has a lot to do with you.

Asif Mohamed:

Well, thank you. So things fall into place, I think over a long career. Opportunities present themselves, and you take the things that you find are going to be fulfilling and you're going to be happy with. So if you were to have lunch with someone at J.P.Morgan, who would that be and why?

Hussein Malik:

Jamie. I've had lunch with Jamie before, so it wouldn't be the first time, but it's always insightful. You learn, you get challenged, you get asked a few questions. You have to be on your toes, but you always learn a lot. And it's been a few years, so I think that would be great. How about you?

Asif Mohamed:

I think Claudia Jury, who is the co-head of sales and research would be an interesting lunch session. I think that Claudia comes from a trading background and she's made that transition into heading sales and research. And so the combination of skill sets and challenges, I think would be interesting to understand how she's navigated those waters.

Hussein Malik:

I can try to make that happen.