Even JPMorgan Payments feels pressure to compete with fintechs

• Key insights: As the largest credit card issuer and merchant acquirer in the country, JPMorgan Payments processes about $12 trillion in payments per day. But it still tries to emulate nimbler fintechs. 
• What's at stake: New and emerging payment rails, such as blockchain and stablecoins, are threatening legacy banks' dominance in commercial and consumer payments. 
• Expert quote: "Payments is a technology operations business at the very end of it… Tech is the lifeblood of what we do," said Umar Farooq, JPMorgan Payments co-head. 

It's hard to overstate the breadth of JPMorganChase 's payments business.

As the largest credit card issuer and merchant acquirer in the country and a global payments behemoth, JPMorgan Payments processes about $12 trillion dollars in payment volume per day, with peaks hitting as high as $15 or $16 trillion. That's more than twice, and in some cases three times, the gross domestic product of Germany, the third largest economy in the world, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Moving that much money requires more than a significant tech investment, according to Umar Farooq, the global co-head of JPMorgan Payments, who spoke with American Banker at the 2026 Payments Forum Conference in San Francisco.

It requires the bank to think, and act, like a fintech. Especially the smaller, nimbler ones.

"Tech is the lifeblood of what we do," Farooq said. "Payments is a technology operations business at the very end of it. It's not like we are going out there and making deals or doing some structuring, et cetera. We are allowing our clients to get money anywhere in the world, to store money, to optimize it, to send it out anywhere in the world, and a lot of that is tech-build-based infrastructure."

Farooq and his team try to emulate smaller fintechs because they are client obsessed. "They look at the client, whether it's the merchant services world… or in the treasury world, and they will find a point of friction. They will then try to solve that point of friction, and in most cases, they will use us or a bank like us as the core rails."

Learning from smaller fintechs has helped mold JPMorgan Payments' approach to innovation over the years.

"Instead of being a monolith from a technology point of view, we also think of ourselves as core infrastructure that enables rapid innovation on top," Farooq said. "And that's why we can build, whether we build blockchain or [real-time payments] or some of these rails, we can go live in certain countries for certain rails in a matter of weeks now."

A few years ago, those same rollouts would take two years, he said.

Banks have been under increased pressure to make technology investments amid a rising demand for software-enabled business payments, expense management and deeper bank-fintech integrations, according to KeyBanc Capital Markets analysts, who noted that clients were putting a larger premium on product velocity and flexible architecture.

JPMorgan Payments competes with the same fintechs in certain areas that it also provides infrastructure, and it partners with them in other cases to deliver services to joint clients. That reach necessitates flexibility.

"Clients do have a different affinity and capability when it comes to innovation or trying new rails. Our approach though is to meet them where they are," he said, noting that some clients want to connect to the bank through more traditional means such as their enterprise resource planning or treasury systems, while others want to connect in real-time through APIs or even through blockchains with their own wallets.

"Our view is no matter how you want to connect with us, we will connect with you and no matter how you want to use our product, we will make it work for you," Farooq said.