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Chana Schoenberger (00:11):
Hi, I'm Chana Schoenberger. I'm the editor-in-chief of American Banker and I'm here at Payments Forum 2026 in San Francisco where all week we've been talking to payments leaders about what's going on in the payment space. I have with me here Umer Farooq, who is the global co-head of JP Morgan Payments. Welcome.
Umar Farooq (00:27):
Thank you very much for having me.
Chana Schoenberger (00:29):
So Jamie Diamond has in public many times described the company as a tech company, even though it is obviously a bank and tech company dollars are what you spend on your technology. So how does the strategy work when competing with big fintechs, many of which are now getting bank charters?
Umar Farooq (00:46):
So first of all, I think you're right. I mean, we run a business which is a bank, but it's heavily tech, especially on the payment side. I mean, payments is a technology operations business at the very end of it. It's not like we are going out there 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 a tech built base infrastructure, et cetera. So tech is the lifeblood of what we do. Now, I would say it's not just big fintechs. I mean, I think you actually have to really look at the small fintechs. The big fintechs actually have some of the same things that actually make banks operate the way they do because the moment they get their charter, they will have compliance.
(01:32):
So I would tell them, be careful what you wish for because it ain't a walk in the park to have the sort of compliance and oversight and regulation that comes with some of these charters. So the big fintechs are innovators we learn from them. But the reason I really focus on small fintechs is because if you really think about how they innovate, they are so client obsessed. They look at the client, whether that's in the merchant services world, which is one of our businesses or in the treasury world, 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 rail. So they will be our clients, but then they will serve others who could be our clients with a much better experience. So we have learned a ton from them on how to innovate.
(02:20):
And I think that's why our approach to innovation has changed 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. And that's why we can build, whether we build blockchain or RTP or some of these rails, we can go live in certain countries for certain rails in a matter of weeks now, something that used to take us two years only a few years ago.