JPMorganChase's high-tech payments division: A look inside

Michael Nagle/Bloomberg

JPMorganChase 's Max Neukirchen has recruited at universities for more than a dozen years. The big question he gets now is different than it used to be.

"We had these cocktail receptions where they used to ask 'How do I become a trader?' or 'How do I become an investment banker?'" Neukirchen told American Banker. "Now they want to know 'How do I get into payments?' They want to be part of what's going on."

Neukirchen is well-positioned to answer. Neukirchen and Umar Farooq became global co-heads of JPMorgan Payments in June last year. The duo is responsible for more than $18 billion in yearly revenue.

The payments division is also the world's largest merchant acquirer and the largest card issuer in the U.S. And it has more than 30,000 staffers.

"We need a lot of bandwidth to manage that degree of spending," Farooq said.

They also share the top payments job at a unique intersection of political unrest, economic uncertainty and the promise — and threat — of a new generation of technology.

"It's hard to overstate JPMorgan's role in payments in the U.S.," Aaron Press, research director of Worldwide Payments Strategies at IDC, told American Banker. "It is not only the largest bank in the U.S. but also one of the largest issuers, with massive portfolios for both debit and credit."

Big decisions

Farooq and Neukirchen succeeded Takis Georgakopoulos, the bank's former head of payments, who later joined Fiserv. Georgakopoulos was in the top post for 17 years, when the digital revolution in payments began to take hold.

The new leaders brought extensive experience in payments to the job. Farooq was the bank's co-head of global payments sales and CEO of JPMorgan's blockchain unit Onyx, whose projects included uses for programmable payments designed for blockchain-based accounts on JPM Coin's digital currency system. Neukirchen was global head of payments and commerce solutions, focusing on payments software and building partnerships. One of Neukirchen's recent initiatives was the expansion of JPMorgan's systems integrator program, which debuted in March 2024.

JPMorgan Chase

"Umar and I have known each other for a long time," said Neukirchen, noting he and Farooq worked together at McKinsey before joining JPMorgan more than 13 years ago.

When a major decision needs to be made, Farooq and Neukirchen are quickly brought in, regardless of where in the payments division the query or idea came from. This project management style is designed to avoid bureaucracy in decision-making or management.

"One of us may be in Asia and the other in New York at any given time, but when it comes to big investments we do it together," Farooq said. Both Farooq and Neukirchen are based in New York.

One of JPMorgan's recent bankwide payment initiatives was modernizing the bank's infrastructure to accommodate an expected surge in distributed ledger-powered transactions and growth in real-time processing. Both trends are designed to attract new users to digital payments.

"Payments are central to what clients of all sizes are doing … they are paying employees, paying taxes, treasury management," Neukirchen said. "They're willing to pay for a good solution. So payments tech is not just an efficiency play but a liquidity play."

Learning fast

New processing methods are a large part of the payment unit's work. As FedNow and the Clearing House's RTP Network gain more users, the bank is anticipating demand for tools that improve processing, and a large gap in learning curves depending on the users.

"That underpins a lot of the topics that are coming up for us, like digital payments, embedded finance, digital assets," Farooq said. "And at the same time, a primary focus is the clients."

JPMorgan Chase

While executives often speak of being "client" or "customer-centric," Farooq is referring more to the range of users that are on the bank's radar, including startups, software companies, global and local firms, legacy enterprises and the financial institutions that buy processing services from JPMorgan Payments.

There are different levels of technology acumen, exposure to cross-border payments with currency conversion and regulatory issues, and challenges regarding scale. JPMorgan's payments unit is examining the level of readiness.

Real-time payments are not expected to be applied in all cases, so part of the strategy is determining what transactions need to be processed immediately and the payments that can wait longer for settlement.

"For us, a big initiative is figuring out the best way to sell to all client segments," Farooq said. "A lot of the startups are digitally native, and we're working all the way to the largest organizations. There is a large spread."

There is also work to get real-time payment systems to work with each other. Most real-time schemes are domestic (even within the U.S., the two main networks do not work together), leaving a major gap for companies that want to move funds between countries with instant settlement. It's a problem that JPMorganChase rivals such as Citigroup are attempting to address.

"We are doing work with our payment infrastructure to test how this would work," Farooq said. "We may have a company in one geographic area paying its vendors in another."

The solution to real-time payment interoperability involves the bank's foreign exchange rail and its data management service.

The same approach to assessing learning curves applies to new forms of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency.

While JPMorgan did not comment on reported plans to issue its own stablecoin, Farooq anticipates demand from a broader set of users.

"There are fewer regulatory complications to doing this now, at least in the U.S.," Farooq said.

Will bots take jobs? Generative AI and other emerging forms of machine learning are growing rapidly in banking, proving helpful in fraud detection, sanctions screening, informing customer service and aiding engineers with coding.

JPMorgan is extending gen AI to most of the bank's employees and has also released AI cash management tools for CFOs, treasurers and other corporate executives.

"People don't have to start a task with a blank sheet of paper," Neukirchen said. "AI allows them to help with ideation, it's about avoiding going through 500 pages to find three errors."

JPMorgan is also encouraging its staff to use AI to help with everyday tasks, like preparing a presentation or summarizing a meeting.

Regarding AI's impact on staffing, Farooq said the bank is focused on what AI can do to streamline workloads. If the workload for sanctions screening increases 20%, AI can help manage that surge, for example, rather than take over the work entirely.

"That puts people at ease," Farooq said. "Once technology folks know it's not about replacing them with an AI agent to write code, they become more productive."

Tariff tolls

Like all banks, JPMorgan is fielding questions about the impact of the trade war and broader political and economic uncertainty.

JPMorgan has lost international business due to President Donald Trump's tariffs, and the bank is also fielding queries about the impact of broader volatility on international payments.

"A more volatile macro environment is a very important time in a relationship with our clients," Neukirchen said, adding clients often have questions about what a dramatic political or economic change means for their business. "We'll get asked 'Do I have to change my business practice?'" he said.

A changing payments market

The battle among companies that provide payment products for both issuers and merchants is getting a shakeup. FIS' April sale of Worldpay to Global Payments, which at the same time sold its issuer unit to FIS, refocused the Jacksonville, Florida-based company on its core business as a bank technology seller while Global Payments doubled down on payment technology.

But given Capital One's acquisition of Discover, the "two-sided market" for issuers and merchant services firms has gotten a major new competitor.

"Capital One will be joining [JPMorgan] and Amex with its acquisition of Discover, so we will be able to see whether the vertical integration is an advantage in the evolving e-commerce market," Aaron McPherson, a principal at AFM Consulting, told American Banker.

"There is also a battle brewing for market share in agentic commerce," McPherson said.

JPMorgan is also one of the few U.S. banks that still owns and operates its own acquiring platform.

"Leading that unique portfolio requires understanding the different technologies that drive issuing, acquiring and account-based payments," Press said. "More challenging, perhaps, is that it also requires understanding the very different investment needs and revenue drivers for each of these markets."

That also requires a flexible workforce. Farooq said the pace of change is the biggest draw for a career in the payments industry — enabling an environment where an employee can work at a bank and a startup at the same time. But it also requires an ability to learn quickly and to get out of one's comfort zone. That's the answer the college recruits get.

"The biggest quality for a young professional is curiosity, a willingness to ask questions and make things better," Farooq said. "It doesn't matter what level you come in."