Vietta Grinberg: Hi, I'm Vietta Grinberg, I run sales product within digital markets for J.P. Morgan, and I'm joined today by Adam Walker in our investor client management group. Adam, welcome, before we get into most of the conversation, perhaps get us started. Tell me about your career and your career journey.

Adam Walker: Well, it is a pleasure to be here with you, Vietta. Thank you for sitting down with me and I'm looking forward to hearing about you as well. My career started 22 years ago at J.P. Morgan, so as folks at J.P. Morgan say I'm a lifer. I started in investment banking, I did that for two years and then it moved over to rate sales. And over the course of the next 17 years, the market evolved quite a bit. I think I officially joined a derivative sales group, which then evolved into a rate sales group, which then evolved into macro sales, to give you an idea.

Towards the end, I ended up managing a team in North America rate sales for hedge funds and asset managers, and I also was responsible for asset managers and hedge funds on the investor side globally for all macro products. Two and a half years ago, I was lucky enough to move over to the investor client management team, as you mentioned, as a senior relationship manager. And now I cover some of the largest clients holistically on the market side of the business. You and I have both worked in a number of different areas together. I think it may have been six or seven years ago when we worked on a specific team together in rates on something. Are you a lifer at J.P. Morgan?

Vietta Grinberg: So I'm not a lifer at J.P. Morgan. I came to JP about seven years ago now. Before JP, I was at another [inaudible 00:01:57] bank, but the way I started my career was actually in technology. I started my career working Lehman Brothers at the time as a programmer, always focusing on the fixed income electronic trading aspects of the business. Eventually I transitioned to a product role at another bank where I was focused on building products for customers. And then an opportunity came up and it was a really unique opportunity to come to J.P. Morgan where my first role at J.P. was focusing on building client intelligence solutions. And that's when you and I were working so closely together.

So I worked on the client intelligence tools for our fixed income sales force and for our clients. That was obviously an interesting experience, as you can imagine with all the data and all of the flows and all the information that we get to see at J.P. Morgan was quite the challenge, so we can talk about that a little bit. And then there was an opportunity to run sales product globally. So in addition to focusing on the client intelligence tools and the analytics, also looking more at the business automation side, and that's essentially what I'm doing right now. But before we get into that, Adam, quite a journey for you. So obviously transitioning from being in the product seat and being in a very transaction heavy business, which obviously interest rates is. And now top of the house ICM that like and what are some of the differences or similarities? This seem like very different roles.

Adam Walker: They are quite different roles and it's an interesting question because the first thing that pops out of my mind or into my mind is not how different they are, but maybe a similarity. When I was in the product role and when I was leading a team, it was still about waking up every day and asking myself what clients needed, how we could service clients the best, what are they thinking? And I really do the same thing in my current role. Now the thing that they're asking about or what I'm trying to service for them is different. In a product role, it's much more about what a portfolio manager needs to do in a certain product on that day.

Now it's more about across different products, maybe how they do business. And I think it's interesting you mentioned when we used to work in the client intelligence role previously, we really worked hard on facilitating direct flow within the business of rates and how to do that quickly and efficiently. And now we work together and it's a much more holistic view of the client and you'll ask me questions, you know, "How can your day be easier?" And my response is, "How can a client's day be easier?"

Vietta Grinberg: Right. For sure.

Adam Walker: And I think that when you're looking across businesses, not only can you service the client within each business, now that I can see, whether it be credit rates, FX, emerging markets, equities, but you can see similarities amongst those businesses. And we can build efficiencies across those and learn lessons in each of those products and the clients want to... They want to hear about that.

Vietta Grinberg: So Adam actually building up on that, you've been in this industry for 20 plus years, how do you think things have evolved and how does J.P. Morgan continue to play given that the field has changed so much? So when you started in bond sales early on in your career, what was the market like then and what was the experience of a salesperson then? Versus how is it now and how is J.P. Morgan remaining as competitive as we are through this evolution? What are your thoughts on that?

Adam Walker: It's funny you say, I think we call it fixed income, but when I started it was bonds. We call it bond sales or bond trading-

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, I know, like bond sales, bond salesmen. Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Walker: And it's a funny story. The first time I was ever on a bond trading floor, what we call a fixed income trading floor, I sat down with somebody and I didn't really know much about how things worked, how banks made money, how clients made money. And the bond trader that I was sitting with, he picked up his phone which had a cord on it, on a trading floor, and he said, "This is the market, this is the bond market." It was a phone, it was plastic phone. And I kind of looked at him and said, "What do you mean the phone?" He said, "Well, you think about the equity market or stocks and you think about the NYSE, and you think about people running around on a centralized trading floor." Whether it be in New York, London, Philadelphia, back in those days. And then you think about, "Okay, well maybe the bond market is not..." There's no centralization. The bond market is being transacted on the phone with each other from bank to bank, from client to bank. And then you realize that market's enormous, and it's not centralized.

Now obviously the phone is no longer the market, and you think about the course of 20 odd years, where did it go from being just on the phone to where we are now and where is it going? And if the bond market was people picking up the phone and calling other banks on that phone and we are in the center of that market, I think we have a responsibility to help evolve that market, think about that market going forward. And how do we think about that market going forward? Well, we're facilitating that market for our clients and with our clients, so the clients are part of the conversation. So anything that we do, and I think it's the reason why you and I talk so often is because you're building products. And we are not building the product in a silo, we're building that product to help facilitate liquidity for our clients. So maybe it used to be a phone and then it was a chat. And where it's going to go next, we're not going to decide we're going to decide with clients together.

Vietta Grinberg: I definitely observed that as we work, whether it's client intelligence tools or some of the workflow automation tools that we are developing. Our strategy has certainly always been, we want to meet our clients where they want to be met, but we also want to be thinking about the future. And with that, there's a lot of responsibility and a lot of considerations for how we build our products. Thinking back to when you and I worked together building the flow analysis tools, J.P. Morgan sees so much flow. J.P. Morgan is in the middle of so many transactions. You can actually get a sense of the market sometimes by visualizing a lot of these flows. Now the way we do it, we always had to be very thoughtful because on the one hand you want to build a product that's going to be empowering and useful to our clients and to our sales force. But at the same time you have to be thoughtful about how you protecting our client's information.

So that's always the approach that we have to keep in mind. Now, when I look now at how we are investing in some of our execution platforms, it's the same thing. We want to be there where our clients want to be met, and of course, electronic trading is not new. It's been around for decades. To the extent that our clients are working with us through vendors and third-party platforms, we are there. We're there on all those platforms. At the same time, I think we realize and our clients realize that when you are transacting through some of the third-party platforms, you are working to the lowest common denominator. You are essentially providing the tools and the products and the streaming pricing for the products that everybody else is doing. That's why in addition to that, we are also putting a lot of emphasis on our proprietary technology, be it direct API connectivity or be it the products that we give to our salespeople, we're now also offering directly to our clients.

I'm often reminded that because of the size and the complexity of our business, we have to handle so many different products. So if I'm going to work with my team and if I'm going to work with you, Adam, and with a lot of your colleagues in sales to build the best-in-class products for our sales force. And if they're going to work for our sales force, they will also work for our clients. At the end of the day, sales has always been a representation, as you said, of what the clients need.

Adam Walker: Yeah, and if we're doing our job, and I say, "Our" as in the sales force investor-client management, we're articulating, we're communicating with our clients and we're communicating that back to you. And everything that they tell us is ingrained and partnered in our businesses and how we build those platforms. It's interesting on that note about asking clients, when I ask clients, "What is it that is important to you?" Always on the list is liquidity. Always-

Vietta Grinberg: Interesting. Interesting.

Adam Walker: And a lot of people immediately when they think liquidity, they think price. And of course price is important, price is potentially the most important. But when we do send out surveys once in a while, and I do have conversations with clients, the other parts of liquidity is dependability and scale, not just price. Because you can always make... Maybe, not everybody, but most people can make a good price when the market is deep and the prices are stable. It's when the prices are not stable and the market is shallow when we hope and need to be there for our clients. And whether that is through the phone like I had mentioned or an electronic platform, that's very, very important to clients.

And the reason it's important to clients is because often during those times is when the trading, the investing, the redistribution of their assets, they really need the liquidity. So when we think about how we're doing the things that you're mentioning, whether it's a client tool or a sales tool, the facilitation of that liquidity is very important to the dependability and the scale that we can provide clients across a whole bunch of venues. Whether it be third party or whether it be a single dealer platform or whether it be on the phone or in a chat, really.

Vietta Grinberg: Talk to me a little bit about your team. Do you mainly hire people with sales background or what's the makeup of your team and how is it different? Again, sitting in the product seat and the transactional side versus now in ICM, what do you look for and what does your team look like?

Adam Walker: Sure. So the ICM team is structured a little bit different than a lot of the markets teams. And part of the reason is that we cover the top 120 clients on the investor side in markets, and we roughly have between five and 10 clients each. And the way to think about it is we are responsible for covering the senior folks at these institutions for some of their most strategic ideas. And we also on the other side make sure that the sales force and J.P. Morgan is earning the market share that we want to earn. That group of people is typically hired from, like myself, a previous business management role or a fairly experienced individual.

However, we don't do all of the work. We have a lot of folks which are called client account managers, which are more junior folks, and those are people we hire out of undergrad. And typically they grow up learning about our clients from front to back to make sure we're prepared for speaking to those clients about some of the strategic opportunities. And in hiring those individuals, it's been interesting because throughout my over 20-year career, it was a fairly straightforward proposition. Hire yourself onto a sales and trading desk, work a whole bunch, learn something and then figure out how you're going to make a living. The workforce is different these days. One, the generation is much more likely to move around jobs. Two, there's a much more deliberate learning. And three, as you know, there is a vast array of technology and tools that these individuals can build and learn and use, to enhance their day job.

Vietta Grinberg: Right.

Adam Walker: The third part's interesting because the skill set for that may be different than the original, which is find a job, move along, apprenticeship model, move up and earn a living. It's a little bit more collaborative, I think. It's a little bit more open-minded, and it's a little bit more learning about not only the product and the product set, but it's also learning about the technology that you can use to learn about that product set and be more efficient.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, that's interesting. I've been reflecting on my team and how we try to optimize and structure our teams on the product side. I find that sometimes it's a challenge because on the one hand, I very much want our teams to be very much embedded in the business. We sit on the trading floor, we sit in the same role with sales and traders, we're in the same chats. We collaborate incredibly closely. Sometimes the concern that I have is we become too product-focused as opposed to more horizontal client-focused. So another part of where we spend a lot of time and focus is trying to make our products horizontal. And investing in teams that are not only going to be embedded on the particular desk or in a particular product and become really deep experts in that product. But who are going to be working on more horizontal solutions and having line of sight into every asset class, and then constantly looking for similarities and bringing those things together so we can have as much consistency as possible.

And then the last layer is our investment in our CRM platform, and this is where we really try to challenge ourselves as opposed to saying, "Great, we're going to have a CRM solution for macro versus spread versus equities," we try to very much build it around a client. We're going to have insight in CRM and workflows around our clients and how we cover them and the products feed into that, but all the folks that work on the CRM products of our team are horizontal and think about it from a client perspective. So it's a tricky balance to strike sometimes for us, I think, because like I said, you want the guys to be product experts and that also gives you credibility, right? Like somebody's going to work with Adam Walker, you have to know what you're doing. So you do have to be a product expert, but we constantly try to balance it out and be as horizontal as possible in what our product solutions ultimately are. And that ultimately gives us scale and that ultimately gives us what I think is the best class solution for our client.

Adam Walker: Let me dig into that a little bit more with you. If you're looking forward... You mentioned CRM in particular, but if you're looking forward and on a more general basis, and you're looking to hire somebody internal, external, maybe from undergrad. What are the types of traits you look for in somebody you're looking to hire with the future in mind, given the future's evolving very quickly and you're really on the cutting edge of that future?

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, I mean, look, I think coming into product, we have people on our team who come from sales, who come from technology, who come from business management, who come from ops. So there isn't one formula that you have to have this background to be successful at product. And in fact, I welcome that diversity and I welcome that diversity of mindset and skillset and background. That's great for us. The skill set that I value and I look for is, I guess, I would say two things. We play offense, not defense. It's about challenging the status quo, thinking ahead and coming up with innovative ideas that are not necessarily obvious. So playing offense, less defense. And also knowing when you don't know, I think that's actually pretty important. I would rather have a person who joins the team and asks a lot of questions, and challenges through the questions as opposed to just defer to an opinion of a senior salesperson or a senior trader.

So those are the types of skill set that are pretty important. We tend to hire, like I said, from all walks of life, obviously understanding of financial markets is important, so that's key. But some of our best product guys are from ops or from sales or from tech or from vendors. And that diversity really, really works for us. So yeah, there is not one specific skill set that you need to do well in a product seat. Honestly, we hire people from sales, technology, trading, ops, business management. It's really that diversity of background and of mindset that I think makes for a really successful product person and a product manager. I would say some of the things that we definitely look for... I would say probably two things. You play offense, not defense. So you don't accept the status quo, but you very much think about, "Okay, I understand the current process. How can we make it better? How can we streamline it? How can it be automated? How can it help my client?"

And really it's the fact that the team is so diverse and comes from so many different walks of life and so many different experiences is what ultimately makes it work. We juggle lots of things to be successful in a product seat. You're talking to salespeople, you are going on meetings with clients and hearing the voice of the client. You're working with technology, you're working with our QA partners, you talk to programmers, you talk to QR, our strats, the gamut is really wide.

Adam Walker: When we were speaking about our interaction, I remember the first time, maybe not the first time, but we were I think driving towards automating some of the processes in rate sales. And when we talk about understanding the business, the communication between products, their client intelligence, and my role at the time rate sales, the real goal was automation. And we met a few times and then you came to me and you said, "In the process of a trade, you do 36 things."

Vietta Grinberg: I remember that.

Adam Walker: And I was blown away at, one, the attention to detail, but how many things we actually had to do to get from point A to point B to close of transaction. And you said, "We're going to automate most of them." And I remember thinking to myself, "Wow, this is a process I definitely want to be a part of because of those 36 things, I definitely don't want to be doing all of them." And I think through that process really again, the communication, but getting in our head as a sales force and understanding what it is we do down to a fine point. And what tasks are meaningful, what tasks are differentiated by a person and what tasks truly can be automated in scale really enhances the job of a salesperson and is super important. And through that process, obviously you learn by doing, we understood the importance of automation, but not only that, but of the product sales team because you can't do it without truly understanding the essence of what we do. And it's been great from a sales perspective. I remember the next year we were talking about the automation point being it makes the job more fulfilling. Because we have times, say that out of the 36, you probably cut down 35 to be honest, but let's just say you cut down 30. And the other six were things that, trust me, if you could, you would have automated, but those are more fulfilling things for sales force.

Vietta Grinberg: That's right. I remember that.

Adam Walker: And knowing how to challenge it and saying, "Is this the best way just because you've been doing it for 15 years?"

Vietta Grinberg: Exactly.

Adam Walker: Is this the best way?

Vietta Grinberg: Exactly.

Adam Walker: And I really think that that's the challenge in the future. And I think we were mentioning teams and we were mentioning hiring people. And I think using technology to do that is going to be what's on the forefront of how we're going to work together really in the future.

Vietta Grinberg: No, for sure. I agree. So when I think about the products that we built and the evolution. As I was saying earlier, when dealers build towards integration with a third-party vendor or a third-party platform, sometimes it's building to the lowest common denominator because you're essentially building what everybody else is making available within the market. The challenge that we've had is we cover a very complex and sophisticated market. We are experts in a lot of markets and we have depth of expertise in a lot of markets. So that means the types of products that our salespeople have to handle are complex and sophisticated. A lot of them haven't been electronified yet. My team spends a lot of time figuring out a way to automate those products that haven't been automated yet at all. Right? So that really means not only working with our sales folks to make sure we automate their part of the workflow, but also working with our trading desk to automate a lot of the pricing for products that in many markets were not automated yet.

And that makes it for an interesting challenge and that makes it for some interesting dynamics on the trading floor for sure. But I do believe the fact that we're starting with our internal sales force is the right approach. Because ultimately when we work with our sales teams, the testing and the scrutiny that comes from working with our sales desk, I think will ensure that the product will work for the clients as well. Right? No salesperson... Well, I've never met one at least is going to say, "Ah, it's good enough." "Eh, they'll take it." The salesperson's going to want to know that it works every time. Back to your other point, it's there for scale and it's there for any market conditions. So the fact that our salespeople are the first ones to test the product and to give us a lot of critical feedback gives me a lot of confidence that the product will ultimately work for our clients as well.

Adam Walker: Yeah, I remember being there with you. And automation can be scary. And when you work with the sales team and you work with the traders, I only think it takes one meeting for everyone to realize that this is going to make everyone's job not only easier, but more fulfilling. You get to do more of the things-

Vietta Grinberg: 1000%

Adam Walker: ... that can't be automated, which I think is important. And I think it's something that I really... Since you've been at J.P. Morgan, we talk about a lot. We talk a lot about with the juniors, we talk a lot about with the seniors to make sure that the electronification of some of these markets is only going to enhance your job. It's not going to take your job away.

Vietta Grinberg: No, for sure. I think on the point of fulfillment, that's really important. Ultimately, I can't imagine some of the kids that are joining our industry now-

Adam Walker: Young adults.

Vietta Grinberg: Young adults. Some of the young adults that are joining our industry now coming into where we were 25 years ago, 30 years ago, writing tickets by hand. People don't do that. People have become accustomed to the convenience of a smartphone and the streaming technology that we have in our everyday lives. And the expectation is the same happens in finance.

Adam Walker: Yeah, I think when you look over the course of time, all the way from when I sat down on a desk and we were picking up phones with direct lines to call people. To now, I don't know the exact percentage, but I guarantee that most of the trades are not done on those phones anymore.

Vietta Grinberg: Of course.

Adam Walker: And the question is, during that period of time, are we going to be deliberate about it? Are we going to make it the best? Are we going to sit back and watch it happen? And I'm glad that we work together because I feel like not only are we trying to make it happen, but we're trying to make it happen in a way where we're listening to clients, where we're listening to salespeople, where we're listening to traders. And really trying to make the experience better without letting it just kind of happen.

Vietta Grinberg: Ultimately, we always try to give more time back so that we can spend more time with our clients and we can listen to our clients better, we can provide better client service, and everything else is adding scale. And it's obviously not just on the sales side, it's also pushing on the trading side and partnering with our colleagues in electronic trading teams to make sure that the pricing aspect of that is also automated as much as possible. And this gives us more time to talk to our clients, understand what their needs are and how can we drive the business forward.

So I remember exactly how my transition happened from being a coder to working on the trading floor. I worked in a team where all my management was based in London, and I was in New York with a team of programmers in New York. And there was a problem one day with our tech, and there were very annoyed salespeople and traders calling my managers in London. And I got a call from my boss in London and he said, "You better go down on that trading floor and talk to those salespeople and those traders and make sure they're okay."

Adam Walker: I have a feeling, annoyed is a light term.

Vietta Grinberg: Annoyed. Annoyed. Annoyed. Correct. So I was like, "Okay." I went down on the trading floor, they were upset, and then they said, "Okay, well this system doesn't work." And I had my notepad and my pen and I said, "Well, let's take a look. Let's see where the problem is." And then they said, "You know what? We have a seat right here. Make sure you sit here until this problem is fixed." So I went and I grabbed my purse and I came down on the trading floor and I'm locked in and worked through the problem. And then my boss called me from London and he said, "You know what? We have lots of programmers. We're going to need you to sit on the floor." And that was my journey of moving away from being purely in the technical field, which by the way, I loved. And there's this creative aspect to writing code, which I definitely missed at the time, to moving closer to the trading floor and working with our users, working with salespeople, with traders. To ultimately understand the business better, understand the products better, and contributing in a different way.

Adam Walker: That communication is so important, especially coming from a sales seat and being in a senior relationship management seat that I'm in today. That communication with people like you in the product seat and the product sales seat and the technology is so important. And we touched on it previously, but without that communication and without that understanding and without that collaboration, it's really hard to get things done.

Vietta Grinberg: Right. Agreed.

Adam Walker: And it's really hard to get things done because speaking to just a coder, or "just a coder," they may not know the ins and outs of the business and learning that. So I'm happy you made the transition.

Vietta Grinberg: Right.

Adam Walker: Is this where you thought you would be in your life, career-wise? When you were younger were you thinking to yourself, I wanted to run a digital product sales team?

Vietta Grinberg: Well, honestly, I still don't know what I want to do when I grow up. So the answer is, I don't know. I'm most likely, no. I came to this country and went into technology because this was a hot field and people hiring, and coders were in demand. So that's what you do. And I ended up taking a job, working in technology on Wall Street because I was in New York, and this is who was hiring, banks were hiring, and they needed people who could write code for them. And it's really through an evolution of mentorship, chance, opportunities that I ended up moving a little bit further away from being very technical and closer to building products and working with clients and working with sales and working with traders.

Ultimately, no, of course, I didn't think when I was in college or even younger that, "Oh yeah, I'm going to be a product manager in a major bank," nor do I know if this role really existed back then, the way it exists now. And honestly, that's part of what's so cool about our industry. You don't have a predetermined path. So when you come in and you join finance, you don't kind of stay and stick in that role. Our field offers an opportunity to do lots of different things and get exposure to so many different aspects of this market. That's why I think it's just such a fantastic industry to be part of. What about you?

Adam Walker: Well, interestingly, I didn't have a ton of direction when I was younger, other than playing sports and going to school. And I took a... We took a survey test in seventh grade to try to figure out what we were most suitable to do when we were older, and mine came out to be a toll taker.

Vietta Grinberg: Excellent.

Adam Walker: Which in retrospect makes sense because I like to be outside and I like to handle money and do math. So-

Vietta Grinberg: There you go.

Adam Walker: ... it totally... Maybe it was less probably intricate and advanced to some of the technology you work with, but it gave me a guide. But in all seriousness, I did think I would work in finance. I don't think I knew how much the financial world evolved over the course of time, and I don't think that it would be possible for me to understand many of the roles. Because when I was younger, some of the roles, potentially your role, potentially my role didn't really exist.

Vietta Grinberg: Didn't exist.

Adam Walker: And particularly in the markets area, in the '80s, it was levered bonds and SPG and securitizing mortgages. In the '90s, it was dot-com, IPO. In the 2000s, it was the evolution of the-

Vietta Grinberg: Electronic trading [inaudible 00:36:23]-

Adam Walker: ... electronic trading, and then rates markets, rate derivative markets. And now we're going through private credit, we're going through back... We're going through all of these different things. So it's really hard to know that you would want to be part of something that doesn't exist at the time. The one thing I'll say that's very interesting about J.P. Morgan is that I made a change two and a half years ago, and I went from managing a sales team to being a SRM or a senior relationship manager.

And I had spent the previous 17 years in macro. And over the last two and a half years, 20 years into my career roughly, I was able to move into something and learn about something on a daily basis-

Vietta Grinberg: That's awesome.

Adam Walker: ... at such a wide... Credit, equities and market structure, how our clients think, all of those different things. And I think that the number one way to learn, is to talk to other people, really dig into those things. And the access that I'm able to get at J.P. Morgan is, it's really mind-boggling, to be honest with you.

Vietta Grinberg: It really is. It's very unique, right?

Adam Walker: Yeah. I was saying in the rate sales seat, we would interview juniors and they would say, "What's the advantage of working in rate sales?" And I would say, well, you work on a desk. This is the room. There's like 50 people in here between sales and trading. There's like 50 people in here. We have number one market share. We're the largest bank in markets. You sit in the area that facilitates the capital flows that go on globally, and you get to learn, understand what they are. There may not be a place of any job that you could learn more about the financial plumbing than sitting in this seat at this bank. And that's one seat. And then having the opportunity to move around the bank is just-

Vietta Grinberg: It's so unique.

Adam Walker: It's so unique.

Vietta Grinberg: It's so unique. I agree. And I was talking to a colleague just the other day, similar, has been in the industry for 25 years, did banking, sales, and he said the same thing. He's like, "I'm still learning. I'm still learning in my seat today." And I think that's just an awesome thing about our industry and certainly unique about JP, this opportunity to move around and see different aspects of this bank. It's incredible.

Adam Walker: So speaking about the aspects of the bank, and there are hundreds of thousands of people at J.P. Morgan, you have the opportunity to interact with a lot of those people, particularly in the markets-

Vietta Grinberg: On the market side, yes.

Adam Walker: On the market side, probably some in banking, payment…

Vietta Grinberg: Sure, sure.

Adam Walker: Who would you choose? If you could choose one person to have lunch with, who would it be?

Vietta Grinberg: Okay, look, off the top of my head, I'm going to say Jen Piepszak. Jen just got this big promotion. She is co-heading the CIB with Troy. I think she's had a fascinating career. She's been at J.P. Morgan for a very long time. My understanding is she got started in finance and business management seat, and she's made a lot of moves and she's made a lot of transitions through her career. So I just think that would be a very interesting person to talk to, to learn about her journey, and also hear her thoughts on markets. Because this is a new business for her, so I'm just curious for a person who's coming in from a fairly different business, what are her observations and what are her thoughts on how we do business and what could we do better? What about you?

Adam Walker: I mean, it's funny, I had a meeting recently with this person. It was more of a committee meeting, but it would probably be Filippo Gori. And the reason is because he spent so much time in Asia, right? He was the Asia CEO, and now he is moved back or "back," but he's moved to London to be the EMEA CEO along with co-running banking. But I think his perspective on seeing what's going on in Asia where that's been really a growth engine. There's a lot with China and how we handle that region, how we've handled that region in the past and in the future. He's really got an interesting look at the growth of the investment bank along with the growth in Asia that's happened over the last decade or so.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, that would definitely be interesting.

Adam Walker: He's a busy person.

Vietta Grinberg: He's a busy guy.

Adam Walker: He's a busy person having recent... But I'd really like to pick his brain a bit.

Vietta Grinberg: No, that makes sense.

Adam Walker: I also love having lunch with juniors-

Vietta Grinberg: For sure.

Adam Walker: Yeah. I mean, sometimes the interaction can be more of a working interaction and then sometimes it's nice to get kind of off campus and hear what their world's like. It is very different living in New York and London than it was when I was... 20 years ago.

Vietta Grinberg: 100%, 100%.

Adam Walker: And kind of starting your career and hearing the challenges and all of those different things.

Anthony McCann: I am Tony McCann. I run Global Leveraged Finance Sales at J.P. Morgan. I'm with Jake Pollack, who runs Global Credit Financing.

Jake Pollack: Good to see you, Tony.

Anthony McCann: Jake, how long have we known each other?

Jake Pollack: I think we've known each other for about 20 years. I joined in 2004. I think you were there in 2004.

Anthony McCann: I was. And in credit talk we call that two distress cycles, I think.

Jake Pollack: Yes, yes, yes. It's been a good run. Everyone who was working pre '08 through '08 and then through the 2010 to I'd say 2024 period, which had its fair share of interesting mini cycles, has certainly earned their stripes.

Anthony McCann: Can you describe what credit financing and what your team does?

Jake Pollack: Yeah, so within the global credit financing business, we have a few verticals. One is our private credit financing business. It's our back leverage business. This is a business that we started really right after the crisis so this is sort of 15 years ago. This is basically, we provide financing to the private credit industry where the underlying collateral for our facilities is private credit. Another sleeve is our CLO business. CLO stands for collateralized loan obligations. So this is the business that finances primarily broadly syndicated loans. Increasingly we're doing PCLOs, which are private credit CLOs. That's something we branded. And basically, what that means is you're creating financing packages, securitizations, for the loan market, and that's both the public market and the private loan market. So it's a business that really complements each other. And I think there's a very good flywheel where a lot of the clients that we trade with also need financing. They also need CLOs, and a lot of the business reinforces each other, really.

Anthony McCann: Jake, you and I grew up in the liquid credit trading business. Tell us how you grew that into the private credit financing business that you run today.

Jake Pollack: So I started in credit trading as a desk analyst. And desk analysts on the desk are responsible for looking at underlying credit. When we started this business, sometimes this is kind of a consistent theme with J.P. Morgan, where we grow a lot of businesses that start from one transaction. And we had basically, and you remember this well, we sort of had one transaction with one client that wanted basically, let's call it a back leveraged structure. And it worked well. We said, "Well, we should do it again. We should it again. We should do it again." And the team that we had looking at the underlying collateral was fantastic. And what we did was we basically said, "Look, why don't we take that same talent pool and create a team that focuses exclusively on this back leverage product?" We take the core of what we do every day, which is understand credit. What does the business do? Are revenues growing or shrinking? What are the margins? What's the leverage look like? All of that stuff. And we basically apply it to a new bespoke product, which is providing back leverage to the private credit industry. So I would say, and you asked this in the question, it really spawned out of our understanding of credit from the liquid trading business. And as our clients began to morph into private credit, we were there with them to provide this financing. And that's how we've basically grown this with them into such a market-leading franchise.

Anthony McCann: Can you describe today, because so many people talk about private credit, what is the opportunity set? What is the landscape? What is the of what's out there now?

Jake Pollack: Yeah. So private credit, it's funny, it's a topic that gets people very excited. What we like to say is private credit is really, it's oftentimes it's the same borrowers, but it's a different delivery mechanism. So basically, a borrower can say, "I want to borrow in the public credit market from a deal that happens off of the debt capital markets asking, we have the market-leading franchise there." There have also been transactions, and a huge growth in this has been where a direct lender will lend basically directly to a corporate. And what we have done there is we've basically said, "Look, we can provide back leverage to that corporate via this relationship with the client." I think, look, it's interesting because when you look at the market today, so I'll give you some interesting stats, and I think you know these well. But if you go back 25 years, if we go back to 2000, the total sub-investment grade, so we're talking below Triple B Minus credit market was about $850 billion. Today, it's about $5.2 trillion. So credit generally, sub-investment grade credit generally has grown over five times, five and a half times in the last 25 years. Today, if you look at that 5.2, what is it? Well, it's about, let's call it 1.6 trillion of broadly syndicated loans. It's about 1.7 or so trillion of high-yield bonds, and then it's another 1.5 or so trillion of private credit, and there's some rounding in there. So a lot of times people talk about, "Well, is there a robbing Peter to pay Paul? Is the market shifting?" I'd say the market's evolving. But all three of those sleeves, loans, high-yield bonds, and private credit have grown dramatically over the last, again, 25 years. And we expect them to grow, to continue to grow pretty dramatically over the next 10 years, all three formats.

Anthony McCann: What kind of bootstraps, when you realize, go back to 2010 during the first facility, when you realized you had something, what are the key credit-enhancing and business structure you put around the team?

Jake Pollack: So I mean, one, the partnership with your team has been fantastic because I think, look, there's three things in this business in particular that you need. One, you need to have good clients. And I'm blessed to have fantastic sales partners that understand their clients are our clients in and out. So you need fantastic clients. You need really protective structure. So the structure of the facilities. Are you lending at a conservative advance rate? Do you have the appropriate covenants in the facility? Are there the right buckets for the right industry concentrations? Certain of those things that we do very well. So you need the right clients, you need the right structure, and then you need the right collateral. You can talk your way around it, but there's no substitute for knowing and knowing really well what those underlying assets are, what they're worth, and what you would lend against them, where you would buy them if you had to, where a third party would buy them if they had to. And so we always say, "There's no substitute for knowing that yourself." And again, that gets back to the last question. So in 2010, what did we do? I mentioned before, we started with an analyst team that was looking both at secondary and was looking at these financing opportunities. And that worked for one facility, two facilities, three facilities. We have 86 facilities today. It's a huge number. There's 1600 underlying assets in that pool. So what we did then is, and this was shortly after 2010, but what we did is we said, "Let's build this team. Let's have it stand on its own. Let's have this team focus explicitly on the private credit opportunity set." And so we have a structuring team. We've got a credit underwriting team that underwrites each of those assets. And obviously, as I said, we've got fantastic sales partners, obviously your fantastic team. And we've also got a sales structuring team that's just top-notch, knowing the underlying clients inside out.

Anthony McCann: Because our clients are not private credit only. They have broadly syndicated loans. They've got CLOs, they've got liquid businesses. Tell us about how you've structured your business now and this flywheel that you refer to. Why does it exist? Why is it the best model to go forward?

Jake Pollack: Yeah, so the beauty of, we call it the credit financing flywheel, is that a client has different needs at different points of its life cycle. So we can provide capital at inception. Oftentimes, that's in a hybrid format where it's a sub-line, where you can basically leverage their capital commitments and we can basically be very early to provide them capital to launch the fund. We then have our core asset-based financing facility, so that's our private credit financing business. They then have some need sometimes to, if they want to monetize closer to the end of the life of the fund, we've got our CLO business. And that can securitize assets. That also allows them to potentially take a dividend if they've had good credit performance in the underlying portfolio. And it also doesn't always happen in a straight line. Sometimes you have the CLO discussion first. Sometimes it's a secondary trading counterparty that says, "You know what? We've got this sleeve that really wants to take back leverage. So we thank you for all of the CLO business you've given us. Can you also give us this?" Or it's one of our secondary clients that says, "I'd love to basically take leverage in the form of a CLO." The interoperability, I'll call it, between all three of those points, and then that doesn't even include secondary trading and all the other things, obviously, that we do on the desk, they really interact well together.

Anthony McCann: Jake, let me ask you the technology question that everybody wants me to. But does technology actually have a purpose in private credit or your financing business?

Jake Pollack: Yeah. Well, I mean, the answer is it does. We've been very proactive on the tech front. So we've got a system, it's called Financing Connect. We've talked a lot about it, and our clients really love it. What does Financing Connect do? In some ways it does some of the very basic blocking and tackling, but it's the basic blocking and tackling that the clients love. It shows our borrowers how much we've lent them. What is the loan to value today? Where are the covenants set? How much could they draw? So all of these things that, and this might sound crazy, but when our competitors lend them money, they have to go to call someone in Delaware to send them a fax to confirm all this stuff, or they got to call some trustee somewhere. By showing the end user all of the stuff, and I'll tell you that the digital markets team who put this together deserves a ton of credit, it looks so professional that it has a lot of buy-in just because it looks so good and it's so precise. Then, it has functionality that allows the client to basically say, "I want to draw more, can I?" You can click, and if there's more capacity in the facility, you can click to draw right there. The button's there. You can take a distribution. So let's say they're over collateralized. They can click the button. They can get the money out. This doesn't sound like it's Web 3.0 or whatever, but it's a basic blocking and tackling function that the clients absolutely love. And one of the secrets of the business, we've got some senior-level relationships. We win business. We talk to the senior folks. The people that really drive the relationship are often the people that are, it's the operations folks that are running the facility. And if they're not happy, they make sure that the senior folks know. If they are happy, our senior folks say, "You know what? I just talked to my operations guys. You guys are great." And so we've gotten a lot of that, and that's a direct result, I think, of this amazing Financing Connect platform.

Anthony McCann: And then for your team, you and I like to joke that if you lend a dollar or a billion dollars at J.P. Morgan, you better have a framework on how you do it. Tell about your framework, your technology framework.

Jake Pollack: Yeah. So look, the technology in that regard is really a reflection of all the underlying stuff we do day in, day out. We have 1600 obligors in the pool. We've got a complexity with 86 different facilities, each with their own terms. So we've literally, we've got credit write-ups on every single underlying asset. But we don't just take those credit write-ups and store them on some hard drive. I mean, that would be highly difficult to review and certainly review at the senior management level. So what we've created is really some very good MIS. We've got some management information systems that allow us to look in the aggregate. Let's take all of those one-pagers, all those credit write-ups, let's input them into the system. Okay, what's the average leverage? What's the average LTV? What's the median? How much equity is in each underlying loan? And not just average, what's the worst case? One of the things we spend a lot of time thinking about, and you and I talk about this, you can be really, really good on average, but if you mess up one thing, you're only as good as your weakest link. We like to say that you could be a seven-foot giant can drown in a six-foot pool on average, because it was one foot, one foot, one foot, one foot, 20 feet. And so we don't want to make that mistake ever. So we basically have the technology system and it's a very robust system. We've got a lot of great tech folks and QR folks that work with us to manage it, to reflect all of the underlying work that our analysts are doing. And increasingly, we're using machine learning to basically suggest things to us. Sometimes it's basic, this name looks like it's got high leverage. What do you think about it? What does the analyst think about it? That's something for me to tap some of my people on the shoulder and say, "Can I see that again?" Sometimes it's even more robust. We've seen a trend here where leverage is taking up or average equity in the deals is going down or x, y, or Z. PIK interest is increasing in the portfolio. Any one of those things where we want to say, "well, hold on, let's take a deeper look." So I would say the tech enables us to have even more robust analysis, kind of top down and bottoms up. Look, the one thing I want to make sure that does not come across is there's no hubris here. We have to keep developing it. So if we rest on our laurels now, in 12 months, we'll be behind. So we are also constantly developing, and that's something we're very proud of, but we don't want to get too proud. Tony, I'm going to ask you one now. So you've got some fantastic relationships with all of the senior most folks at all of our clients. How do you maintain those relationships? And what are some of the things these guys are saying now?

Anthony McCann: Well, to know me like you do, there's a process behind everything. So quarterly, I make calls to each, what I think are each founder, CEO, CIO, senior portfolio manager that I know. And that can range up to 50 calls per quarter. And what I do is I'm absolutely and super lucky to sit on a floor with 400 sales traders, research, and capital markets people delivering liquid and non-liquid credit trading and origination to all of them, so I see it all. And from seven in the morning till six at night, it's buzzing all day long, and I'm able to create an opinion. And quarterly, I try to distill it down to three or four key tenants, and I imprint them on every client, senior client. I ask them, "what do you think?" And they give me their opinion back. At a different stage, we have all the salesmen doing that on a quarterly basis to get just mechanical where we are, how we're doing, what we're missing. And I combine that with what my view is, and I bring it back to the senior leaders. It's been a super effective process over the years, and I wouldn't be able to do it if I didn't have the seat that I have.

Jake Pollack: Is there a time that you remember where it was sort of the most impactful?

Anthony McCann: Yes. Over the years, without a doubt, the months of March and April of 2020. Because as the credit markets and all markets were generally in free fall, I began to receive calls from the largest clients that they had immediate access to capital to deploy into those markets. And the phones just started ringing and ringing and ringing, and then you realized there was at least a current bottom for what was going on. And we brought that to our debt capital markets, and we were able to do an immediate multi-sector, multi-issuer rescue financing at the time for basically most of the corporate credit markets. At points in time through May, we had a 60, 6-0% market share, and that was on the primary side. And that, I think, we were close to that on the secondary side on some days.

Jake Pollack: Yeah. I mean, this was a really unique time in the market. I mean, leveraged loans, which typically trade pretty close to par, were trading in the seventies, which implied, obviously, that the refinancing at par was not something that was going to happen in the near term, but these were clients that were telling you, "We've got capital and we're buying."

Anthony McCann: Yes. It was previously structured funds that were called kick-ins or drawdown funds that hit these marks. And not a lot of the street was aware of this, and we were keen to that. And telling that to the other clients who were selling, it was that mix of those calls in that quarter that probably was the most powerful, I'd say, in my career.

Jake Pollack: So what are they saying today?

Anthony McCann: So it's a mix. This is going to sound tired, but it's that mix of yield versus spread and a low default rate. So in the credit markets, they've got a lot of capital to deploy to satisfy those yields and are nervous about the spreads, but are all seeing a benign default rate and are okay investing in that because their clients are asking them to.

Jake Pollack: What are guys saying about the trade-off between public and private?

Anthony McCann: I think the good thing for most of our clients, they have their foot in both markets, the biggest clients. So to them, it's a matter of just which pocket of money is being deployed. But it seems like you and I are seeing the ball from our seat better than the rest of the market is.

Jake Pollack: Yeah, I mean, look, we obviously agree on that. I mean, I think it's interesting, our CLO business, which it does do some private credit transactions, we do some PCLOs, but we've got, I mean, our pipeline right now of broadly syndicated loan financings, which are financing, obviously, the public market, we have more deals than we know what to do with, which is a high-class problem. We're happy about that. But I do think it speaks to the ebb and flow of capital creation and credit. And I think sometimes the media likes to make it an either/or. And to some extent in 2022 when the broadly syndicated market was more challenged, it felt that way, but it's not that. Borrowers really do have options to look at both markets. And I think that's going to continue to be a theme as we go forward. What is the, let's call it the illiquidity premium for private credit versus what you can get in the public market and what are the trade-offs?

Anthony McCann: The one thing I did want to pick back up on is defaults. I think you and I, and certainly the way you run the credit book is we pick best clients with best structure and best credits. So with a average default rate around 2%, I always like to say, as you know, I always say, "That means 98% of the time things are going right." So that's a pretty good credit environment. Now, the 2%, if we focus on that, as I like to say, also, "The ice is thin and the water is deep and cold." So the default environment in that 2% is very treacherous. So although it's a small part of the market, it can not be ignored. And that generally is with poor credit picking, poor documents, and poor underlying assets. So I seem to be giving a fairly optimistic view of where credit's going and where it is now. You being the risk-taker, how do you look at the downside currently, and what do you see on the forward?

Jake Pollack: Yeah. I mean, look, I think you're right to point out that the 2% is a treacherous world right now. But I think we have to be realistic, 2% is far below what the, I'd say, the regular way default rate should be. So it's tough to pinpoint it, but if the default rate tripled from two to six, we shouldn't be surprised at all. Now, you will see plenty of press headlines saying, "Default rate tripled," and it was going to read negatively. But I mean, in my view, whether or not that's your base case, you should be able to operate in that case. I think some historical context is useful. In the GFC, the default rate got to 15%. Now, let's think about that. 15%, so it's 12% if you don't include distressed exchanges, it's 15 if you do. The math gets a little wonky. But in a 15% world, the average recovery of the lenders of a loan in that environment was something like 40 cents, 50 cents. If it's a bond, it's 40 cents. If it was a loan, it's 60 cents. That's getting a little bit lower. But let's just use 15 and 50%. That's seven and a half points of loss experience over a two-year period. If you assume the cycle last two years, it could be shorter or longer, but let's just... So that's only 3.5, 4% a year. And what I think is really interesting right now is those numbers are nominal numbers. The return you get is also a nominal return, which is to say that you get SOFR Plus, and even though SOFR Plus is coming, it used to be SOFR plus, let's say 7. Now, it's SOFR plus 4.5 to 5. The returns would suggest that you can still absorb some of those potential losses. I spent a lot of time thinking about, look, 15%, that would be bad, and it'll be disproportionate in certain lenders. Certain lenders will have even worse experience. You can have some people that tide came in, they were naked, and they'll have in the 20s, and those might have some real problems. But the best lenders are likely to do better than that, materially better than that, and that'll average into the 15. So it's actually, if you think about it, kind of hard to get to a case where there's a negative return, on average, for the industry. So that's a long-winded way of saying, "It's going to create a lot of opportunity. There'll be a lot of distressed trading for us to do." I think our financing is going to be, that's going to be a fantastic environment, frankly, for our financing business, and we will likely grow as some of the weaker players don't navigate it well.

Anthony McCann: Jake, describe private credit as if you were describing it to a seven-year-old.

Jake Pollack: I have an eight-year-old and a six-year-old at home. I would say to them, "Look, lending is often described, it's one of the oldest businesses in the world." And the reality is before Jimmy Lee and some of the advent of the broadly syndicated loan markets, a lot of credit was private. In most credit, if you walk into the bank and get an auto loan, it's really a privately arranged transaction between you and the bank. So private credit's not a new theme for us. At its core, what is private credit? It's a direct transaction between a lender and a borrower. That's what it is. I think why has it gotten so much attention? Well, I see two reasons. One, there's been a boatload of capital raised. You don't raise one and a half trillion dollars of capital under the private credit header without getting a lot of attention. Two, and this is where it's even a little bit interesting, it is private credit and direct lending as distinguished from calling a middleman who arranges the transaction. So when one of our clients, rather than calling J.P. Morgan to buy a loan that we've arranged, goes directly to the client, they've in some ways circumvented that public market. As you and I know, we were very early to private credit. So whereas, if one counterparty goes direct to that borrower and just lends the money, and they're going to hold it forever, I guess they don't want to trade it with us. Okay, that's okay. We can understand that. We can provide financing against it. So that's really when you go back to what we started in the financing business in 2010, that was really the innovation. It's super simple, but these folks are making loans directly. Okay, we'll deal with that. They want to augment the returns. They want to put in equity dollars and augment it with leverage. J.P. Morgan can provide that leverage, and that's been a huge growth market for us. So Tony, if you could swap roles with anyone at J.P. Morgan, who would it be?

Anthony McCann: Moussa, and I'm sure you don't know who he is. He's the security guard that I see first every day at J.P. Morgan when I walk in the building. And he and I have a daily routine that differs on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. And I think it'd be great for him to be on the third floor for a day, and I'd be down checking IDs and making the building safe.

Jake Pollack: Wow, you'd be great at that.

Anthony McCann: One other thing about Moussa is he's an Olympic ping pong player. He represented Nigeria in 1988 and '92 in the Olympics in ping pong.

Jake Pollack: That is unbelievable.

Anthony McCann: Jake, you grew up in Livingston, New Jersey. Is this where you thought you'd be here today?

Jake Pollack: No. I mean, I'll be honest, I was a psychology major in college, so I think banking and trading was about as far from my mind as it could have been up until my second semester of junior year in college. And then I switched to econ and said, "You know what? Maybe I'll give it a shot." And Chase hired me in 2004. So I would say growing up, I don't think J.P. Morgan was on my radar. But I will say I'm thrilled that Chase took a shot on me at the interview day in 2004. Tony, you're a kid from Long Island, military, you spent a lot of time on Wall Street. Is this where you expected to be as a kid growing up?

Anthony McCann: No. History major in college. I served in the Army in peacetime. I got out, moved back to New York, and my dad was in advertising. He worked for the same firm for 42 years. My brother has worked for the same firm in his business for over 35 years. So I knew whatever I did, once I found it, I was going to stick with it. And it just happened to be this. It's sort of random how it started. I was five years at Lehman Brothers, and I've been here for almost 30.

Jake Pollack: And I will say, this is supposed to be the fun, how did we get to know each other part of the session, but I will say, our client base really values that. And in all of our discussions, I mean, they know that J.P. Morgan as a brand is extraordinary, but it is not without the long tenure of our key people. They really like the fact that we have been in the seats for a long time, and a promise we make is not going to be honored by somebody else. It'll be honored by us.

Anthony McCann: Yeah. Certainly, it's lucky that it starts at the top with Jamie and the other senior leadership. But when you go through 2008 with some of the same clients, and then you go through COVID with some of the same clients, and they pick up the phone and call you first for the biggest, hardest things that they're going to do, you know that the consistency of the people and the process and your business is why they're doing that.

Jake Pollack: Do you remember your first time on the trading floor?

Anthony McCann: I do. Yep.

Jake Pollack: Talk about it.

Anthony McCann: So it was January 1990 at Lehman Brothers. It's a very similar trading floor to what we have now. I had just got out of the Army, and when I got to that floor, the eighth floor, I looked out and I saw individuals with specific skills working as a team in small business units, all coming together on one floor for a common goal of winning. And I was like, "I like this," but I had none of the glossary. I knew about guns and grenades, but I didn't know anything about basis points and yield curves, and that just took time. But as soon as I walked on the floor, I'm like, "I like this." And that's almost 35 years later.

Jake Pollack: It's a good point about the getting along too, because when you're in those close quarters, you do have to get along with people. And I will also say, look, it's a testament. You have been a senior leader on the floor for basically the entire time I've been on the floor. And the tightness of our ship, while also allowing for people to have fun and laugh at each other and make small talk while getting stuff done, is really great. I don't remember a single difficult event with anyone on the floor. I mean, obviously, we've had growth and some people have left and some people have joined and all that. But I mean, the collegiality is really strong.

Anthony McCann: That's why sometimes I push back when people, something gets changed, their regulation, a new mandate from the top, so to speak, and they say, "It's not fun on Wall Street anymore." I'm like-

Jake Pollack: "Come to the third floor."

Anthony McCann: "Nah, I don't think so. That's not right. This is still fun."

Vietta Grinberg: I am Vietta Grinberg. I run global sales product within markets at J.P. Morgan, and I'm joined today by Brad Tully. Brad runs our corporate derivatives and private side sales, and Brad is also head of America sales. Welcome, Brad.

Brad Tully: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Vietta Grinberg: Absolutely. So Brad, before we get into the complexities and your role in running the global franchise across corporates and private sales, perhaps get us started with your career. How did you get started in this business and what has this journey been like?

Brad Tully: I started... so I've been at J.P. Morgan for 22 years. I went to school at the University of Scranton, which is a small liberal arts school, Jesuit school in Scranton, Pennsylvania. I was a finance and economics... finance major, economics minor. At the time, J.P. Morgan recruited from the school for a rotational program, which had me rotate throughout the bank for about a year and a half to two years.

I did a number of different rotations including in retail, financial services, emerging markets, finance, as well as structured trade finance at the time. After that year and a half, two years, I decided to move into what was at the time just the investment bank into a group that was called Structured Products and Derivatives Marketing, which was effectively an interest rate and currency derivative marketing group that had focused on corporations, private side situations and the like, and spent some time doing that for a number of years, got into commodities at one point, equities at some point, and then through the years had the opportunity and privilege to lead those various businesses, particularly in North America. If you move forward to the last five years or so, I had a fantastic partner where we ran the global corporate derivatives and private side business for the last five years and here we are today.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, no, that's great. Sounds like quite the spectrum of products and a very interesting career. When you reflect back, when you look back to when you were started or even 10 years ago, would you say your side of the market, the markets have changed drastically? Do you feel that you changed how you recruit based on the changes that you've seen or has it been similar?

Brad Tully: I think that there's some similarities, but there's also some differences that we can touch on. So I think the pace of technology and what technology has brought to whether it's our own organization or our client's organizations has been tremendous. And so certainly when you're pulling in talent, whether you're recruiting from schools or you're pulling in talent that's already experienced hires, you're looking certainly for folks who have an understanding and appreciation and adaptability with respect to technology, but also can use it very much still in a human aspect and connecting with our clients, certainly from an interpersonal standpoint. So the interpersonal skills, the communication skills, the ability to get along with your teammates, the team atmosphere certainly is paramount and I think that has been consistent and gotten more important as we've gone on. But the technology aspect, the interest and the ability to change and appreciate change I think has really gotten accelerated.

Vietta Grinberg: No, that obviously makes a lot of sense. We have been speaking with some of your colleagues within the markets side of the business. A lot of them have interesting stories in terms of how they have to collaborate obviously with clients, with trading, with the product teams. I've been very keen to specifically talk to you because I think the intersection of working with markets and banking is very unique to your role specifically. What is that like? How does it work? How has it evolved?

Brad Tully: It is an interesting aspect of the role and it's a great one. So currently I sit on the global investment banking executive committee as well as our sales management committee here within the markets franchise. And so I have this hybrid role, if you will, relative to some of the traditional sales and trading or traditional banking roles. And so one, you meet a lot more people and you understand a lot more about the institution overall because there's a tremendous amount of interaction, teamwork internally and ensuring that we're connecting with the right folks internally on the banking franchise and partnering with them so that we're delivering the full franchise, whether that's markets, payments, investment banking.

The like capital markets to our clients in a fulsome manner. The transactions can be high profile, which is exciting. It's an exciting part of why people like to be a part of the team. It's across all of the asset classes. And so we have the ability on any situation that our banking partners may be working on with our corporate clients to deliver equity solutions, credit solutions, currencies, commodities or FX. And so we really try to come with a full franchise to bear in that sense. We also have a fair bit of markets related activity in the traditional sense, so we work on various private side situations that may emerge, and so we have the ability to kind of go in and out of these two worlds.

Vietta Grinberg: We also touched a little bit on the size and the complexity of our franchise, global business distributed across time zones, jurisdictions, geographies. How are you managing it? What are some of the differences that you're seeing in terms of geographies both with your own team and with the clients?

Brad Tully: It's a great question. It's one of the more fascinating parts of the role to be able to one, visit and spend time with so many different parts of the world and people and cultures and backgrounds. It makes the job super interesting and I think a real joy to be around. It also brings, as you say, a number of complexities, and so making sure that we have the right people in the right locations matched off against the right type of clients is really important.

So I spend sometimes too much time flying around, which can be challenging at times to balance the family aspect of it. At the same time, it does present an opportunity to get to know people from all over the world and we feel like we have a fantastic management team that keeps the pulse of the local markets. And I think one of the things that we do at J.P. Morgan, despite being the size of who we are, is try to make sure that it feels really local. And one of the challenges and opportunities that we have is making our organization even to the largest organizations or the smallest clients that we may have, feel really small and holistic. And that's something that I think the rest of the senior management team really strives for.

Vietta Grinberg: That's cool. No, that makes a lot of sense. Reflecting on some of our competitive advantage, do you think the size of our franchise, the complexity of our business is a overall net positive? What makes it easier to compete? What makes it harder to compete? And what are some of the differentiating factors when you guys go out or your team goes out to win business, what are some of those differentiating factors versus our competitors?

Brad Tully: Depending on the situation, it's the fact that we are a complete franchise and in everything that we have chosen to operate in, we're a top franchise player. And so the ability to bring that type of breadth and also depth to a client's situation is tremendously powerful and value add for our clients. We hear it all the time and across the world from clients. The ability to deliver J.P. Morgan is of tremendous value.

And so when we think about what's our challenges in that aspect is we are large and making sure that we make clients feel like it's a small place as well, that's important. They want to know who their banker is, they want to know who their markets individual is, they want to know who they can call when there's an issue. They want to know who they can call when they have a problem that they know we can solve, and they want us to do that, deliver that with the best execution, speed, technology at competitive levels. And so it's a high mark to hit and we think we do it better than most, and I think that's demonstrated in terms of the power of our overall franchise.

Vietta Grinberg: Brad, you manage a diverse global team. What are some of the things that you most proud of and if you were to overhear a conversation, what might that sound like?

Brad Tully: So first off, we have a fantastic team. It's been a team that we've had in place for a number of years. It's been a team that we've continuously recruited what we think are the best and brightest folks, and whether that's from our undergraduate programs, graduate programs, or experienced hires, we really think we have a talented team. I think one of the characteristics that sets the team apart is their partnership first type focus where they understand that they're going to be put in situations from a banking standpoint, from a market standpoint where they may be the subject matter expert, but if they're not the subject matter expert, they're likely to know who that subject matter expert is. And if you don't know the answer that a client is looking for, you don't have the solution, the next best thing is knowing who within the organization has that.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, it's really connecting the organization.

Brad Tully: And so the team very much understands and appreciates that. And because of that, you have a team that is multidimensional in their skillsets. And so a number of them truly are cross asset sales individuals. And if they're not fully cross asset, they're certainly very competent in multiple asset class disciplines. It's a powerful tool for the franchise. It's one that is valuable to our clients. It's one that we constantly hear from clients that your sales individuals, your marketing individuals, the folks on your team, they're able to answer the questions that are within their domain and they're able to get the right people on to answer the questions that may not be in their domain and the speed of which they can do that. And we know that it's coming from one voice from J.P. Morgan is powerful and differentiated versus the rest of the competition.

Vietta Grinberg: Looking to the future, what do you think is the future for your team? What are some of the trends that you think are impacting your business and what does a future salesperson look like in your organization?

Brad Tully: So one of the trends that continue over time is a salesperson working at J.P. Morgan trying to make J.P. Morgan feel small, yet very holistic to our clients. And when we speak to our corporate clients all over the world, they're looking for differentiated guidance, perspective. They're looking for senior individuals that can help them across multi-asset classes, multiple situations. And so ensuring that we have that team that delivers that is of utmost importance.

In terms of the interpersonal skills that we look for and will continue to look for, a lot of it is about teamwork. It's about recognizing that the individuals you spend time with most in your working day are your teammates and being able to collaborate to partner and to recognize that you're there for the client is of utmost importance as well. When we think about what else is out in the future, I think the rise of alternatives, the rise of private side situations has continuing to grow. And whether that is corporate accounts, financial sponsors, diversified asset managers, they're all looking for private alternatives that exist and sitting at the nexus between banking and markets puts us in a fairly competitive situation to help originate those situations as well as risk manage them.

Vietta Grinberg: Makes sense. Brad, can you talk a little bit about the spectrum of the clients that you focus on and your team focuses on?

Brad Tully: One of the real benefits of the franchise that we have is that we cover all size types of companies. So from the smallest startup companies that are just emerging and may have currency implications in their business or trying to understand how to go into a country or how to risk manage a particular currency, we service them to the largest corporations in the world who may have needs in commodities hedging, they may need to buy back shares, they may have interest rate hedging and they may have large currency portfolios and everyone in between. So what means is we see the full spectrum across the globe in terms of scale of companies and we need to match that in terms of our skillsets. And so the skillset in order to service one type of company may be different than the skillset needed to service some other type of company. We get involved in situations across the banking franchise, and so it may be a loan that we're helping to risk manage for a client and that may be the first loan they ever have, or it could be part of a large acquisition financing that we're looking to risk manage.

Vietta Grinberg: Brad, what role has technology been playing in your business? Where is it in terms of the spectrum and what are some of the investments that you have been making to leverage technology to help you work with your clients in a more efficient manner?

Brad Tully: So one of the things that we always try to do within the franchise is making sure we're being proactive with our clients around their potential concerns and their potential concerns or problems. And that may be a public company may have made a number of statements in their investor day, their earnings calls that we need to ensure that one, we're up to speed on what their most pressing issues are, and then two, proactive in different ideas that may help them in that aspect. And so we like to use technology to help source and understand some of their more challenging situations or the direction to which these companies are headed. We also have invested heavily and built the tool J.P. Morgan Transact, which is an end-to-end solution across payments, FX, and hedging for our corporate clients. And it enables them to do pre-trade, trade, and post-trade on an end-to-end basis that's integrated within their system franchise.

Vietta Grinberg: All right. Let's go to some fun questions. If you had an opportunity to swap places with somebody just for a day, who would it be?

Brad Tully: It would be my 2nd grader or my 3rd grader.

Vietta Grinberg: All right.

Brad Tully: Both girls.

Vietta Grinberg: Excellent.

Brad Tully: They seem like they have a lot of fun at school and generally have no concerns.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, that's the luxury I suppose. Okay, that's cool. If you had an opportunity to have lunch with anyone present at J.P. Morgan, who would it be?

Brad Tully: There's a world-class ping pong player who's a security guard at the front desk at J.P. Morgan in New York.

Vietta Grinberg: So Brad, you talked a little bit about your early starts in your career, you went to school, studied finance and economics, and started at J.P. Morgan. Is this what you envisioned this journey would be like?

Brad Tully: I think when I first came to J.P. Morgan over 20 years ago into New York City over 20 years ago, in my mind I always had this, maybe it was a two to three year rolling out look of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to get. And J.P. Morgan's been a place that I owe a lot to in terms of my career and everything that's come around. And so no, I didn't think this is where I would end up. I love where I am and it's been a great journey. I think every few years I've been asked to do something different, sometimes a bit similar, sometimes very different, and that opportunity to grow and learn has been great and it's a competitive environment, it's a fun environment.

There's a great amount of team aspect and growing up playing sports, you can see the joy that people get that I get, that our team gets around the team culture and spending time with our clients. I mean, it's ultimately why we're here. Some of my closest friends at this point are clients as well, and it really makes a difference. I never imagined that I'd be here and certainly on set, but now that I am, it's been a real journey. It's been a privilege, it's been challenging along the way. We have a fantastic team. The culture of the team is great. It's something that I think a lot of us, myself included, are proud of. I had a rolling two-year outlook when I first got to the city. At some point that probably changed to our rolling five-year outlook. And as I've gone through the journey at J.P. Morgan my entire career, I've been met with opportunities, with challenges, with meeting new people, with doing different things, with spending more and more time with our clients, which at the end is some of the most rewarding experiences that you can have.

Vietta Grinberg: I am Vietta Grinberg. I run global sales product within digital markets at J.P. Morgan, and I'm joined today by Olivier Cajfinger. Olivier runs IG credit sales, public finance, and short-term credit sales. Welcome. Can I call you Caj?

Olivier Cajfinger: Yeah, everyone calls me Caj, so please.

Vietta Grinberg: Excellent, very good.

Olivier Cajfinger: Very happy to be here today.

Vietta Grinberg: So before we get into the intricacy and complexities of running a global sales business at J.P. Morgan, perhaps let's talk a little bit about your career. How'd you get started, and how did you end up and where you are today?

Olivier Cajfinger: Of course. So I joined J.P. Morgan 20 years ago in our Paris office, where I stayed for a couple of years. Then I moved to London, where I stayed for 16 years, and then on the back of the Brexit strategy, I got relocated to Paris. I've done my entire career at J.P. Morgan in the financial industry, and, as you said, I'm running now global sales force, which is focusing on, as you said, on IG credit, public finance, and short-term credit. We have teams all over the world, as you can imagine. Paris, Frankfurt, London, New York, Boston, San Fran, and I could keep on talking, listing the cities. And yeah, it's a challenging job, but also very exciting.

Vietta Grinberg: So Caj, tell me about the transformation of this industry, especially in your business, especially reflecting on credit. How are things different today versus when you got started or even 10 years ago? And specifically around what do you look for when you hire? What do you look for when you bring on talent? Have things changed drastically, or are they consistent? If we can maybe talk a little bit about that.

Olivier Cajfinger: Sure. So I think my business, the IG credit business, has gone through multiple changes from a product perspective, from a trend perspective, from a tool perspective, from a technology perspective. And our clients have become much more sophisticated, much more mature about the credit agenda and about also the various technology that have been launched in the last few years.

We all hear about ETF, we all hear about alternative credit, we all hear about index products. Our clients have become much more sophisticated in the way they invest in the credit market. And as a consequence, our job has been to remain on top of those new trends and being capable of serving them in the right way, taking into account those new technologies.

The challenge of the job is to have a global approach to that. Trends in Europe are different than trends in the US or in Asia. By having a global approach as well, it helps to potentially copy-paste some of the good practices in the US into Europe, or vice versa. That's for the fundamentals of my business.

When it comes to hiring, I guess at the end of the day it's a people business, so we are looking for people that care about our clients. We're going to be looking to serve the client in the best way as possible, but are also thinking a step ahead, are aware of the new technologies, are aware of the new trends, are thinking about innovation, and more importantly, being very entrepreneurial because our job is to understand what are the client cares, what are they looking to do, and being agile and entrepreneurial to save them the right way. So having salespeople who care about their clients remain the most important thing.

Vietta Grinberg: So pivoting a little bit towards the digital agenda, and you and I spent a lot of time connecting on the workflow automation solutions, brainstorming how can we make the life of a salesperson more efficient? How can we arm the salesperson with the best data? How has that changed, and what are your reflections on the journey at J.P. Morgan with digital markets so far?

Olivier Cajfinger: Yeah, I indeed remember very well our first interactions when you were working me through the automation agenda and where you wanted to go, and needless to say, and I'm sure you remember, I was a bit skeptical-

Vietta Grinberg: Yes, there was some skepticism.

Olivier Cajfinger: ... because obviously changing habits is tough. And I do remember your answer was "Caj, I've seen that movie multiple times, so you need to trust me." Having said that, you were right, and it took us a bit of time to understand where the different markets were going, where you wanted us to focus on, and I guess the different teams all over the world have been now focusing and adopting the automation process that you work through. And definitely it has been naturally held by our client requirements, because obviously our clients are also thinking the same way that we are: the low-touch agenda, the high-touch agenda, how do you execute in a faster way, how do you execute in a more impactful way and efficient way. So the automation agenda has been clearly helpful to, again, deliver the right service to our clients.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. So Caj, in credit sales, coming in the morning within the credit markets, what does that look like for a salesperson?

Olivier Cajfinger: So first of all, a coffee-

Vietta Grinberg: Coffee, yes.

Olivier Cajfinger: ... to start with. The joke aside, then obviously you look at what have been the main headlines overnight, what has been the past activity the last few days. You obviously reach out to your clients first thing in the morning, sharing color, flows that we have seen and we have executed because they are keen on hearing what J.P. Morgan has been either trading or doing.

Then the dialogue starts. We look at, as I said, the past activity, the cares that our client showed in the last few weeks, and, as you know, we've built a tool internally to keep track of this, what we call IOI, indication of interest, which helps salespeople to remember, to follow up, and to potentially come back to the client with the right offering that they're looking for. So the day-to-day is really interactions between our traders, our research, our syndicate, which brings a lot of new issues, as we know, and obviously delivering this platform to our clients and making sure we match what they are looking for and what we can potentially deliver in light of their requirements.

Vietta Grinberg: I recall when we started working together, a lot of the asks, a lot of the requests from the sales force were around "Help me bring the franchise together." Right? We cover our clients in so many different geographies and we need to see where their common interests around a particular credit. So I remember at the time, really our investment in bringing the franchise together, bringing the data tools together, presenting them to the salesperson in an intuitive, fast, real-time manner, made a lot of the difference.

I remember through that journey us having to be thoughtful about protecting client's information, but at the same time building products that are going to be used by the sales force and ultimately help them deliver the franchise and deliver the value.

Today, building on top of that foundation, we are also looking at workflow automation in the transactional space. How do we expedite the process? Get the solutions to our clients faster from a booking perspective, from a straight-to-processing perspective? And that's another area where we are really collaborating a lot.

Olivier Cajfinger: I think the creative markets are multiple times bigger than they were a decade ago. What it means is means more issuers, more bonds, larger capital structure, just more activity, and many more clients all over the globe. So naturally we need to have tools that help us to log those data to remember them. I mean, when I started, I was using an Excel spreadsheet. Now we have all these tools that you and I have been building to make the job faster, quicker, and more importantly, more impactful for the clients. Because with a different tool that we build, each salesperson has access to the past inquiries or trade of the client they cover, the potential good trade ideas that could derive from those past inquiries, the research input, the research analysis. And all that together, by being displayed and offered by the tools we have built, helped the different salespeople to reach out to the client in a faster way and more importantly, in a more impactful way by basically pitching the trade that will be the most interesting for them by using all this data and tools.

Vietta Grinberg: When I reflect on the challenges that we have to solve for enabling our sales force, when I look at a globally distributed team that is talking to clients in Tokyo, in Hong Kong, in Paris, in London, in New York, in San Francisco, in the Middle East, all over the world, I think our goal, our job within digital markets, is in a distributed environment, in a distributed team, make it feel like the salespeople are sitting right next to each other. Make it feel like we're all right in the same room and we can just talk to each other, even though, of course, physically that's not possible because the business is that complex and that distributed. So what we try to replicate with the tools that we build, with the technology that we are collaborating on, is really creating this network effect, where we build a technology in such a way that even though you could be in a completely different time zone, it feels like you're collaborating with your colleagues right there and then. And not too dissimilar from some of the day-to-day applications that we use in our personal life. Wouldn't you agree?

Olivier Cajfinger: Yeah, absolutely. The complexity of our credit markets, the fact that it's a much richer offering compared to a decade ago, plus the fact that our franchise is now much more global than it is, mean that if we want to make sure we are leveraging on the size of the network of customers we cover, mean that we absolutely need to leverage on the tools we have built to make sure that, as you pointed out, we can leverage on the network effect that you mentioned. I think our credit offering is much more diverse than it was a few years ago; it's richer, but our network of investor is also much larger than it was a decade ago because everyone is invested in credit now. So the importance of connecting the dots internally has never been that important, and the only way to be capable of connecting the dots in an efficient way is to leverage on the tool that your team and my team have been building these last few years.

Vietta Grinberg: No, for sure.

Olivier Cajfinger: Keep in mind that our salespeople have four screens in front of them, and two of them are dedicated to the use of data. How they are reading those data, how they are delivering those data in a user-friendly way to our clients, but also helping them to connect internally with Trader Syndicate, but also other salespeople in various regions, and that helps us to connect the dots even further.

Vietta Grinberg: All right, some fun stuff.

Olivier Cajfinger: Good.

Vietta Grinberg: What does your coffee order look like?

Olivier Cajfinger: It's a very boring order.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay.

Olivier Cajfinger: It's a double espresso during the winter, and it's an iced coffee during the summer.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay, so it's seasonal.

Olivier Cajfinger: Correct.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay, very cool. If you could pick somebody at J.P. Morgan to have lunch with, who would it be?

Olivier Cajfinger: Of course it'll be with you, Vietta.

Vietta Grinberg: Naturally, but we do it enough. So if you had your pick somebody to have lunch with, who would it be?

Olivier Cajfinger: I think I would love to have a lunch with the film crew today because I felt like a Hollywood actor, and that was the first time in my entire life that I felt that way.

Vietta Grinberg: I agree. This is the most glamorous experience at J.P. Morgan for me, for sure.

Olivier Cajfinger: And for me as well.

Vietta Grinberg: One of the things that motivates me in the morning before I come into work is that I feel that in our industry, in our roles, every day is a new problem to solve, which is awesome. I can't say that what I'm working on today is going to be the exact same thing as what I'm going to work on tomorrow. Having the privilege to work at J.P. Morgan, you really get to solve some of the more complex and interesting problems, and I love that. I think that's absolutely awesome. That's a great part of our jobs. What motivates you?

Olivier Cajfinger: It's very comparable. I think a lot of people think that our job can be boring because it's very repetitive and the same task every single day. Actually, I think it's the total opposite. Every single day is different. It's very entrepreneurial. It changes a lot; we have new dynamics every single day. I'm sure you've seen the movie Groundhog Day. Every single day is different. So that's what motivates me when I come to the office every morning.

Vietta Grinberg: No, agreed. We talk a lot about how we use technology in our day-to-day lives all the time, and of course that has an influence on how we build products within J.P. Morgan or for our salespeople, for our traders, for our clients, and even how we use technology in our own personal life. The importance of staying connected in a global business is critical. The importance of me staying connected with my family is very important. I'm actually in transition right now. I'm transitioning from using texting as one of the main ways of staying on top of where my kids are, where my family is, to now going to Snapchat because the kids have made that transition, so now naturally I have to follow. So it's just interesting how it all gets intertwined, and a lot of the experiences that we have from our personal lives for how we use tech are also influencing how we build products with our clients, in collaboration with our clients, with our salespeople, and with our traders. What about you? What's your go-to app every morning?

Olivier Cajfinger: I use LinkedIn all day long.

Vietta Grinberg: Okay.

Olivier Cajfinger: LinkedIn is a fantastic source of information for my day-to-day job. It gives a very good sense of the trends in the markets, the pulse of the new technology, the different new products that are coming to the market a bit everywhere. So LinkedIn is really my good, my go-to app every single morning.

Vietta Grinberg: Yeah, no, makes a lot of sense.