Jasmine Ferreira: Hi, I'm Jasmine Ferreira. I head up the marketing at JP Morgan for the Markets, Securities Services and Sales & Research teams.

Eddie Wen: And I'm Eddie Wen. I'm the Global Head of Digital Markets.

Jasmine Ferreira: Before we get going, I just want to give a bit more, for you to give us a bit of a background on your role at JP Morgan and how you got to where you are today.

Eddie Wen: It's a long journey. I started off as a software engineer on Wall Street. In the early days, I did a lot of software development, particularly around portfolio analytics systems, as well as some derivative pricing tools. Over the years of working on the trading floor, I got exposure to the trading businesses. Started doing a lot of work around electronic trading in foreign exchange. Built the very first electronic pricing systems that powered the early days of the electronic business in foreign exchange. And in 2006, I was given the opportunity to run the foreign exchange e-commerce business at JP Morgan. I joined the bank, started in the business and that really took off over the years. It started in foreign exchange. It ultimately expanded into commodities, rates, and many other fixed income businesses today. Up about six years ago, I was given the opportunity to lead a product effort called Digital Markets. That's what I've been doing since.

Jasmine Ferreira: You've been doing it since. And that's not just what you do though. You're on a few other things within the firm that you get involved in, such as the AI committee. Just give us a little bit more insights into what that involves.

Eddie Wen: Look, I've always been on the crossroads between technology and business. The business people think I'm a technologist, the technology people think I'm a business person. But ultimately, I think that the blurring between the technology and the business has been happening over the years, and I've always had in roles that is how do you actually position the business for transformation and how do we actually make the right investments, so that we can leverage capability that's out there? Getting our business comfortable with that transformation is also part of the job. And largely, in the last several years, is not just our own business, it's also with clients, the industry and whatnot. So I find that over the years, it kind of mushroomed into a variety of other roles.

Jasmine Ferreira: It's interesting, because one of the things that, we're in marketing, a little bit different, but we have to understand how the business works and you have to understand how the business makes money. When you're talking about business innovation, technology innovation, talking to each other, is it become more vital that your technology teams are understanding the business side of it?

Eddie Wen: Oh, absolutely. I think over the years, as I said, the blurring of the lines between technology and business is very pervasive. You look at a lot of our largest companies today are technology companies. What's happening with the FinTech transformation with banking is very important that banks figure out how to navigate the technology landscape, how do you leverage technology? And now, it's even more obvious with AI and the new trends that are happening in the marketplace. I think that being able to understand technology and business is a real asset. And I think that's what we want to position our people to be more like. And as part of digital markets, always get very much involved in the software engineering aspects of what we do, the design of our systems, how things work, but more importantly, understand what's the business rationale.

How do we make money? How do you serve clients? How do you make all these things come together? I think it's very important that that amalgamation of the skillset actually takes place with everyone in the business. I think a lot of the challenge in our businesses is actually not the invention of the technology, but rather adoption, implementation, integrations. And that usually is the most difficult part of technology. It's not so much building it. It's actually getting people to use it, getting people to change the way they do things. That could take a long time and it could take a lot of energy and effort. And really, more importantly, it takes a lot of understanding of what the client's needs are, so a lot of our efforts really focus on driving adoption and implementations.

Jasmine Ferreira: I know that story well. We're looking like ... I've been here 10 years. It was probably eight years ago and we're pushing FX algo trading. And it was just like, part of my team's job was to really convince and educate. And naturally, those behavioral shifts happen over time. Old school trading on the phone, the loud trading floors, they're a little bit quieter now in that sense from the digital side of things. It really is about understanding what clients' needs are, but also telling them what their needs are. To an extent, being ahead of it, be more proactive than reactive. But I think that behavioral shift is well on its way now. I think it's just more about that continuous education as that innovation comes in. It's how do we keep informing them, making them. Ultimately, we just want to make our clients as smart as possible, so that they can do the best job for themselves. And ultimately, that has a holistic effect on JP Morgan as a firm.

Eddie Wen: I think that's absolutely true. If you look on our trading floor, one thing I've noticed, everyone's very busy. I think I heard this from one of the CEOs from a technology company, he said, "Everyone's works really hard, but they get so little done." I think the nature of being busy is not necessarily sometimes the best way of using our time. How do you actually figure out to adopt different tools to make what you do easier and changing the operating model on how we operate and also invest a little bit of time of learning an alternative way of doing things. That's really important. I think, over the years, if you look at the adoption of technology, that has, look at electronic trading in foreign exchange. The amount of time it takes for people to conduct a trade, book a trade or risk management, it's gone down substantially due to automation.

But have we done things the same way we used to do before? Very different. Like you said, the trading floor is very quiet. I remember in the early days of my career, I used to take clients on tour of the trading floor. And quite frankly, today, the noise level on our trading floor is much lower. It's not as exciting going to see a trading floor at JP Morgan during NFP because there isn't as much chatter. But believe me, a lot of activities are happening, in fact, much more than what was done back in the days when it was a lot of commotion. Now, it's just a lot of click noises and click, more chattering. But nonetheless, I think the amount of business that we've been doing because of electronification has grown phenomenally.

Jasmine Ferreira: Yeah. No, it's a good point. We have a dedicated team in Vieta's world that is there to help alleviate the news technology to help the salespeople do what they need to do. They sat down with our sales teams and worked out and they do like 36 tasks. How can we then make that process, no, reduce that for starters, make that process easier for them, but then also enable them to do what they really should be doing, which is engaging and talking to clients and delivering in that sense. I think we do recognize it, and I think having those teams in place just highlights that a lot.

As you mentioned, Eddie, that the trading floors are a little bit quieter now. People are, I wouldn't want to use the word churning, but they're doing multiple tasks with the adoption of technology, it's enabled them to scale the amount that they're actually able to do at one time. But we also have to be conscious that that's not always sustainable. We look at ways that we can alleviate the number of tasks, make that easier, whether that be of AI or machine learning. Before we go into that, let's just define what a platform is.

Eddie Wen: Look, we operate a number of different efforts within digital. One of them could be like our JP Morgan market portal. That allows essentially the navigation and aggregation all the tools and services, as well as the platforms that the business offers. I think of it as facilitating access and discovery of content, services, product, and what shows what the firm has to offer. When I think about a platform, it tends to be more about facilitation. How do you create a venue where both a client or salesperson is kind of conducting services using an intermediary agent that allows the services to be procured more effectively? I think we're all consumers ourselves, that we're familiar with the platforms around Netflix or Amazon or Airbnb. The concepts behind those is, really, how do you actually facilitate, be that intermediary or services, as more people come to the channel, they tend to get better services along the way.

I think a lot of that theme goes with many of our systems and platforms today. How do you build something that allows every business to participate and allow every client to participate? Now, you could amortize the cost and investment, not just with one particular functions and features, but really allowing those platforms cost to be amortized through all businesses that are trying to provide this similar level of service. Clients get the benefit of a one-stop shop. How do you actually do all the things you need to do from pre-trade, trade to analytics, post-trade data, all the capabilities that we offer on these channels in one place? That's a convenience factor that's a real win for both our clients, as well as for ourselves.

Jasmine Ferreira: And I think completely right. It's that holistic presentation of the markets offering to clients in one place. If I'm reading FX Research, I should be able to act on that in the same place. I shouldn't have to go out, log into a different platform or portal, or we'll finish on that one. It should be as easy and intuitive as possible. And of course, there's certain things where it needs a little bit more color and it needs a bit more conversational and a little bit more insight that we want. The JP Morgan Markets platform or the JP Morgan markets is someone's daily routine. They log in, they use it, but then we should think about if we want that to become a client's daily routine, then we also need to make it something that they would use in their daily routine.

When we think about your Amazon, your Netflix, your Airbnb, how do people interact with those in their daily life, or how often they use it? What can we use to learn from those type of platforms to bring it into a platform that we want to become part of a daily routine. Even though it's part of their job, but you spend more time at work than you do watching Netflix in the [inaudible 00:09:46], I'd like to think. How do we think about that in an e-commerce way to make it stickier for clients, but then also an enjoyable experience at the end of the day?

Eddie Wen: Look, it's all about making things easier for clients. I think we benefit from that as a consumer ourselves. I think stepping back a little bit in a history of how systems get built within our businesses, typically in the old days, we would have a business area that thinks there's a needed feature or functionality and they would build a system that solves that very specific problem. Over the years, we collected a lot of these different tools and systems and "smaller platforms capabilities," and it became this mosaic of different tools that were not interconnected. They would became ... While it solves a problem very well, they're not interconnected. And also, the workflows between various system systems became very cumbersome for our clients. I think the concept behind digital markets is really, how do you make things easier? It's not that different that when you go bank with Chase today, there's one app that allows you to look at your checking account balances, your savings account balances, your credit card balances, maybe your mortgage payments, your car loans. All these things come-

Jasmine Ferreira: Travel.

Eddie Wen: And travel.

Jasmine Ferreira: Shopping through Chase points, just to add that in there.

Eddie Wen: Certainly. Trying to, on the institutional side of the business, a lot of these services are still very fragmented today. Our vision is to how do you actually make all these services be much more integrated? There's a one-shop shop for all the capabilities. And more importantly, the data, the authentication processes and the security behind much of this can be shared and common across all the different channels. Bringing all our businesses together and making a cohesive product offering, that's the goal of what we're trying to do.

Jasmine Ferreira: That's the northern star, because it goes back to that business innovation versus tech innovation. Sometimes we need to get things to market quickly. How do we balance it between, "We just need to deliver on that and get it out," versus, "Are we actually thinking about this in the long term and how it all fits together?"

Eddie Wen: Having been working on the trading floor for many years in my life, I think it's very important that demonstrating success and making incremental improvement is critical. The vision of executing the grandiose plan, while it's great, we have to demonstrate that we're able to carry it out. And the best way to do this is to demonstrate incremental progress along the way. A lot of our efforts and projects that we run, I'm a big believer in measuring KPIs and metrics, how much revenue does it generate, how many users are adopting. How do you make sure that, as you are going to the ultimate journey of putting everything together, we are directionally making progress and getting stakeholders buy-in? How do you get their support? How do you make sure that the investment dollars that you're putting in every one of these platform builds actually are demonstrating value? It's a balancing act between what is tactical, realizing results, and making sure to validate your thinking that, ultimately, this is the right direction. I think, a lot of our project governance is really focused on incrementalism, as well as, are we strategically heading forward the right target state?

Jasmine Ferreira: That's why it all comes under your group, because you need to have a holistic view over, even going to the UX side of things. They all need to look like they're from the same family. And there's the kind of marketing, branding thing that comes into it. How have you positioned? I know there was some changes about the way the UX teams were positioned, that they weren't just working on one product or one functionality. Can you just give us a bit more insights on how that got shaped to deliver this all in the same family?

Eddie Wen: Yeah. Design is an important component of what we do. How do you actually make these applications look like it's cohesive, where the workflows are stable, that's largely a design function. You call it UX, but largely, what does the user experience look like across the different channels? We have one team that reports directly, and to me, that oversees the design of our applications and tools and making sure the user experience is consistent. Whereas, each of the business line may know specifically what are the functionality and capabilities that clients' needs are. How do you make sure the client experience across all of them are consistent? That's an important part of pulling together platforms and make them cohesive. You may be building an application, say for research, that allows research customers to consume content along the documents to prescribe. That shouldn't be that different than say how sales and trading commentaries are actually being consumed.

In fact, we are looking at a cohesive design across these different areas, try to make the user experience consistent so that it's easy to learn, it's easier to pick up. And also more importantly, we can share the cost of development. All these tools and capabilities, we don't have to reinvent the wheel over and over again across each one of these business silos.

Jasmine Ferreira: Yeah, it's like one content publishing tool here, one here as well. Actually, if we just put the money together, we could have done that a lot quicker and it'll save a bit of cash on that. Due to the size of our firm, and we've had these conversations in this series over the last week. We had it in the sponsor's conversation, we had it in the private markets conversation. Adam Walker gave a great example of, "I can't take 45 people to a meeting." We take two and they come back and they find the solution, and then, they deliver it back as the two.

I think people's expertise and different parts of the business that they work in, and we can relate this to your part of the business, is very niche, and then, naturally, things do fall in silo. But I think, as a firm, where we deliver so well for clients and how we continue to do so, is behind the wheel and the cogs are actually working in harmony together to reach those solutions. So actually, the clients aren't really aware of too much of what's going on behind the scenes to get to the end result, which is great because that's our problem, not theirs.

How do we prevent those silos happening? Because naturally, you have digital product teams who they live and breathe those products and so they should. They're so passionate about it. It is almost like a mini-FinTech within the wider picture, but making sure that we are staying connected, so that the end-client experience, and I think we can bring UX into this. The end client experience is seamless. It's intuitive and they should be able to find exactly what they want when they need it. I think we can also talk about, when we talk about competition and working, looking at competition and say, "We're not afraid of competition. We work with others." Ultimately, is that a client should want to do business with us, but also we need to meet them where they want to be met.

Eddie Wen: The reality is I think we are all inspired as consumers of the Apple experience. When you open up an Apple product, there's no instruction manual. It just works. It's easy, and I think we aspire to do that. Now, will we someday be able to build a portfolio trading systems and credit that is the Apple experience? Absolutely. I think that's the direction that we're trying to travel, but this is a subject matter expert that's very complex. It requires a lot of expertise, a lot of data, a lot of experiences in these markets. But marrying that together with the various different platforms and the user experience that we are very familiar with, how do you make this easier? How can you electronically quote a portfolio of bonds and be able to trade them with one click of a button, just like you can do foreign exchange? We're taking ideas that has historically been developed in one product silos and trying to apply it to different asset classes.

That's actually a unique proposition about the horizontal that I oversee. It's not aligned with one particular business line. It's really about the concept of a platform. How do you share ideas? How do you cross collaborate between different channels? One thing I have noticed over the years in working in the financial services industry is that, a lot of innovation stays within one particular vertical. Just because you have a really good idea in one, it oftentimes takes a long time before those ideas transcends from one area to another. Our job is really to take the best ideas and make best tools, best product capabilities, and how to apply them across different areas.

An example of this is, if you look at our execute platform, we started as a foreign exchange trading tool. We actually spent very little time building foreign exchange capability. Yes, we're incrementally improving it, but we're leveraging a lot of those capabilities that have existed in foreign exchange. How do you apply them to commodities, to rates, to credit, to equities? These are areas that may not have had a single dealer platform for a long time, but now that capability is there and we're using the same ideas and expertise in some cases, even the same individuals that build some of these tools, how do you actually make them leverage across the different areas? It's very intuitive. It's easy to understand and it's consistent naturally, because it's the same platform. I think that's how you deliver services and tools that make it easier for the clients.

Jasmine Ferreira: And the stickiness, right? The client came on and predominantly just using FX. We used to call it the macro platform, now it's just the platform of execute.

Eddie Wen: Yeah. Look, it's ease of doing business. And when I think of stickiness, I think of it as like if you reduce friction, people naturally gravitate what is the easiest way. I think we are all victims of convenience. We tend to like to do things that's convenient and easy and look at all the things that we do and how busy we are. If you make it easier, people naturally will do more and that overall increases productivity and get things done quicker.

Jasmine Ferreira: Eddie, let's talk about competition. Highly competitive markets business for starters. When we talk about platforms and how we engage with competition, and we talk about open architecture, APIs, and ultimately, meeting clients where they want to be met, so they can make the right choice as who to go with. Give us a bit more insights into how you think about that, because it is, we are opening ourselves up and saying we might not always be the best choice.

Eddie Wen: It's a very interesting dynamic. The phrase I like to think of is co-opetition. It's hard to tell who is a client, who is a competitor, who's a partner. I think, over the years as clients become very successful, they become very large, our platform becomes very successful. Well, you started off as a distribution partner, ultimately becomes a competitor. And also, we have classic competitors, which is the various other bank platforms that we have to compete with. And the reality is, I think with this explosion of digital technologies out there, clients are given a lot more choices. They don't like to be confined. They don't like to be verticalized in one environment. We want to promote competition that allows open API access. That's an important theme. If you look at a lot of our electronic trading business, I think they flourish because of the ability for us to interconnect and share data and allow executions to happen in the lowest friction way as possible.

I think the same goes for many of our aspects of our businesses. How do you make sure there's interoperability? I think the old business model is like, I will build a singular system, where you would be able to live and do everything you like to do by. It's great, but it's very difficult to carry out, nor is it ultimately what some clients want. We want to give them the option to be able to live in one particular ecosystem, but the reality is there are a lot of things that we may not be the best at doing. We need to acknowledge, how do you embrace open architectures? How do you allow certain service provider to be complimentary to the services that we're trying to create? How do you make this ecosystem weave together in a seamless way? I think that those are the platform themes that we look to.

We regularly have discussions with many platforms that oftentimes started off as being a distribution partner for us. And as that they've gotten bigger, really hard to tell whose client is it. It's actually ours. And ultimately, I embrace that level of competition because it ultimately gives us the need to develop better services, clever pricing mechanism, and also, how do you ease the burden of operating across the various different platforms to make it easier for clients? I think, ultimately, this is a good thing for clients, but we need to figure out how to navigate this landscape. I think we have a tendency to want to work with platforms that allow us to interoperate more openly across different channels.

The question was about how do you think about competition? I think the way I want to end it is really about we want to embrace competition because it keeps us on our toes, and ultimately, gives clients a better service. The point I was trying to detract away from is the verticalization. How do you capture people in this vertical cell that doesn't allow them to have a choice to go to other things?

Jasmine Ferreira: Yeah, we don't want clients to feel constrained to only using one platform, one product. You want to open it up so that they have choice. As we've already said, not an educated, but an informed client, a well-informed client is a good client. We actually learn from our clients. We speak to them, we ask them, "What do you like about this? How can we improve? How can we do better?" And then we'll go away and we'll hopefully meet their needs in that sense. I think showing that vulnerability and saying, "Hey, we might not always get this right." This is just like Innovation 101 or one. You got 10 ideas and throw them against the wall and only two stick.

Eddie Wen: Look, in reality, the competition is probably the best thing that's ever happened for our clients. When we have a platform, we often have to make sure we are competing effectively with other bank's capabilities, as well as third-party channels, and ultimately, the client have the choice of what they want to do.

Jasmine Ferreira: Ultimately, clients have choice, and we're not going to put our hands up and ignore the fact that there's competition out there and they've got multiple providers they can go and speak to and do business with. But it's also being vulnerable to say, "Hey, we want you to do business with us, because you've made that decision, you've analyzed what's out there. And in this particular instance, you're coming to us." Of course, that's the ultimate Northern Star. And as we said, a well-informed client is a great client. This steers into the front-of-mind approach that we're always trying to take. It's about transparency and sharing what's happening.

The markets business, and we've spoke about this recently, doesn't talk a lot traditionally. We're not thinking about talking on the phones in traditional way of trading, but everyone's got their secret sauce as to what they're doing. It's a competitive environment and we're seeing that change. People want to hear from our traders. I act on a premise that if I could just listen to two people having a conversation over the water cooler, what would I hear from them? How do you make our people, our experts, more available to clients in that sense? We do a lot of that through thought leadership content, whether it's a podcast or it's a white paper or it's what we're doing here today.

I have this premise in my team that I never want a client to watch something and not learn from it. It's very easy to put out fluffy content because you're just doing it. But it's very vital, and you talked about the content architecture that we're working for JP Morgan Markets platform, and it's staying front-of-mind. Why is that client or why is that person going to log into our platform versus our competitor's platform that morning? What can we give them? Pricing is not always easy to control. We've seen that recently. Where's that value add and that secret sauce that we can share with you to make you more informed, to make you do your job better, and ultimately, do more?

Eddie Wen: Look. Historically, our business is a bit media-shy, and I think a lot of the conversations tend to happen bilaterally. And now, as you all recognize in the world today, there is so much information and so much content out there, it's very hard to separate the signal from the noise. What we try to do is want to be that beacon of understanding and teach the clients on certain themes and thematics that we think are important. And ultimately, like you said, a more informed consumer is a better customer for us. A lot of the concepts around automations and giving better tools to the client can't really happen if the clients don't adopt it and use it. We spend a lot of time on telling the story about why this is important and actually getting testimonials out there to change how people operate. Like our earlier point, people are really busy, but are they getting the most work done? Are you providing the better tools?

I think a lot of what we try to do is not really trying to make money on this one particular trade, but rather how do you change the process? What's a better way? And it's also important that the industry hears this, not just our customers. Sometimes you hear other banks will listen to some of the podcasts and things that we do and say, "Well, why are you showing your competitor what we're doing?" I think it's really important to get the word out there and also bring that cohesion as an industry on how do you adopt certain changes that will ultimately grow the pie, make us more efficient, get us more productivity. I think those themes, I think it's relevant and it resonates with broadly the whole entire industry.

Jasmine Ferreira: And it creates trust. When we always talk about in times of volatility or liquidity whenever you need it, those kind of lines that, as marketers, love to throw out there, but you don't have trust without proving what you can do. That's an ongoing process, and I think not being shy to say, "We do have this, but we're not going to be quiet about it, because we don't want our competitors to know about it. We should stand up tall and shout from the rooftops that we've got this, and hopefully, they won't shout louder. We are being transparent. I think, when you're being transparent and it builds that trust and it builds those long-term relationships.

Eddie Wen: Look. It's often also a two-way conversation. Do we get everything right? No, absolutely not. I think there are a lot of things, ideas that we've had that just didn't work or we invested in something that really didn't catch on. And I think, having those two-way dialogues and having open conversation helps us fail fast at things that don't work and focus on things that do work. I think that's an important part of innovation and creating new ideas and also having that two-way dialogue with our clients and see what sticks and what doesn't. I think that's an important part of how do we actually get things done.

Jasmine Ferreira: When we are pushing our content out there and we're sharing this with clients, and it's about going from perception to belief. When I think about what my team do, or if you even think about to traditional advertising, you see something pop up on your reel or on your phone and it's, "Okay, how do I make that transition from just seeing something to actually believing it's true?" And that's where my team play their biggest role is to take on that journey. And it's about taking clients from perception to belief. I talk about this in a marketing point where you see an advert. It pops up on your phone or one of your apps, for example, is how do you take a customer from seeing something to believing something? And a really strong tactic of what we do is bring our people to our clients, make them more accessible.

If you've got a trader who's got some desk insights, let's share that at large. Let's not be afraid to keep our secret sauce and to keep everything private. I think that shows that builds trust with clients and also it reflects your team strategy of being accessible and letting them make those choices.

Eddie Wen: Absolutely. Look. If you made it this far in the video, I would encourage you to engage us and figure out what are the things that we can do better. Whether you're a client, you're a competitor or you're a platform, ask, "How do you make the things that we do on a day-to-day basis easier?" Take the time to understand how you would envision better tooling, better systems, better platforms that could, ultimately, do the things that we do more efficient. In a world of AI, there's going to be a lot more efficiencies to be gained on the capabilities that are out there, so figure out how to re-engage, how do you figure out what reinvent the process? I think this is how innovations happen with conversations and dialogues and ideas.

Jasmine Ferreira: We've been honest and says we do enjoy a bit of competition, but naturally, we want to be the best. Give me a bit more insight into how we can stay at the forefront and be leading in this space.

Eddie Wen: It's about maintaining a consistent discipline investment profile over the years. If you look at the amount of capital we expend for technology investments over the years, it has not gone down. It's consistently stayed where it is or gone up. And I think that's reflection sort of our focus and a commitment to make sure we invest for the long term. The return on our investments aren't measured in terms of months, they're measured in years. The ability to kind of leverage the capabilities, leverage our scale, leverage our diversified portfolio of different capabilities is what differentiates us versus our competition.