JPMorgan is poaching developers who work on video games like Fortnite and they say it's 'actuall

Publish date: 2024-08-11

JPMorgan Chase, for one, says it's having no struggle at all when it comes to hiring engineers and developers to build out its vast digital ambitions.

At a financial conference Tuesday, Gordon Smith, co-president and consumer banking chief at JPMorgan, said the bank has "honestly had no problems attracting that talent at all. It's actually been very exciting."

Anecdotally, Smith said that a number of the developers he's spoken with have left careers developing video games to join JPMorgan.

"It's actually been very easy," Smith told Erika Najarian, an equity-research head at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, at the conference.

While state-of-the art tech offices — in addition to Hudson Yards, the firm in September announced a new fintech office in Palo Alto to house 1,000 employees — likely help, the scale of JPMorgan's opportunity is what Smith highlighted. Here's the exchange:

Smith: I was talking to some of our developers, and I asked them — I often do — 'Where'd you come from?' And they come from the gaming industry, not the gambling industry, the gaming industry.

Najarian: Fortnite, yes.

Smith: Yes. And I said what attracted you to JP Morgan Chase from gaming? They said, "Well it's so exciting. When we do something with JPMorgan, we can hit thirty, forty, fifty million customers." And there's a little bit bragging rights when you're talking to your friends and you can say you know, "Well I've worked on this component of the mobile experience." So we've had great success at attracting talent and retaining them.

The talent needed to build that vision doesn't come cheap. Smith said the company is increasingly trimming the number of call-center jobs it has in the $30,000-a-year range and instead adding "digital designers, software programmers, software engineers, artificial intelligence PhDs" at the $100,000 to $150,000 range.

"When I'm moving expense into software developers, AI engineers and so on, they're all building for the future. They're all accelerating the medium to long-term growth of the company," Smith said.

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JPMorgan is poaching developers who work on video games like Fortnite and they say it's 'actuall

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