The Most Powerful Women in Banking, No. 5, Lori Beer, JPMorganChase

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Lori Beer's team recently wrote an open letter to third-party suppliers, asking them to step up their efforts on security and compliance. The letter mentioned concentration risk, a growing concern to bank regulators as banks gravitate toward the cloud-based services of tech behemoths like Google, Microsoft and Amazon.

One antidote to concentration risk that her bank, JPMorganChase , has embraced is working with smaller vendors.

"Engaging with smaller providers is definitely important," said Beer, who is global chief information officer at the $4 trillion-assets bank, the country's largest. "We actually have a team dedicated to helping us ensure that we are engaging with emerging tech companies in addition to the big hyperscalers."

Another way to reduce concentration risk is by avoiding lock-in with vendors. JPMorganChase works with all the major cloud public providers and has an on-premise cloud, she said.

"If SaaS vendors can reprioritize trust, which includes built-in security guardrails, modernized security architectures and more collaborative security practices and transparency, we'll see more solutions that are secure by design with embedded security and resiliency," Beer said.

Since the letter was published, the bank has seen "an overwhelmingly positive" response from third-party vendors, including many of its own providers, Beer said. "Discussions are continuing, so we're looking forward to seeing what comes of them," she said.

JPMorganChase, which has an $18 billion tech budget, has been a leader in AI adoption. It earned American Banker's Innovation of the Year award in 2025 for its LLM Suite, which provides secure access to large language models to more than 230,000 employees.

Beer's team of 63,000 people has also fast-tracked deployment of AI in specific areas of the tech organization, such as software development and cybersecurity.

"We've already seen up to 20% efficiency in coding as our engineers utilize coding AI tools," Beer said. "In cybersecurity, we built a threat modeler copilot to help developers better understand the threats of a system's design and enable them to mitigate or minimize the risk earlier in the development lifecycle. It's already making an impact, saving developers hours, streamlining their workflows, and ensuring comprehensive threat coverage."

The bank has also been a leader in quantum computing for several years. Asked what motivates her to put resources into something that's still years away from becoming a practical reality, Beer said financial services has been identified as one of the major industries to benefit from quantum computing innovation and therefore "it's imperative to cultivate awareness around its transformative potential and discover how it can advance business priorities."

The bank has been working on quantum readiness, being prepared to take advantage of quantum computers when they are available and practical for work usage.

"We are taking a data-centric and risk-based approach to post-quantum cryptography, working actively and collaboratively to ensure our firm and the broader banking sector take the necessary steps to become quantum secure," she said.

Earlier this year, the bank's Global Technology Applied Research team published research in Nature magazine: a demonstration of a novel quantum computing protocol to generate certified randomness, Beer said.

"This achievement surpasses classical computing capabilities and marks significant progress for quantum technology, paving the way for a potential commercial use case in the future," she said.