Here's JPMorgan's pitch to top, young talent

Flickr / Aspen Snowmass

Wall Street isn't the lure to the best and bright that it once was.

Startups are considered cool and sexy, and big financial institutions have been going through a tough period. A survey last year showed that only 4% of graduating Harvard Business School students wanted to work in investment banking.

A lot of top talent is choosing other fields.

But according to Daniel Pinto, CEO of JPMorgan's investment bank, banking is still interesting, precisely because it has so many challenges.

In a wide-ranging interview with Business Insider, Pinto said that his bank hasn't had a problem attracting talent, with close to almost four in five of the new hires into the corporate and investment bank in 2015 classified as millennials.

Here's the relevant passage from the interview:

Turner: You referred to the need to access top talent. How do you do that, exactly?

Pinto: I think that in order to attract talent, you have to run the company in a way that is appealing to them. That's why we have a clear technology strategy, and have communicated externally about how vibrant and flexible JPMorgan is. It's a way to attract top talent into the organization. The more people you hire from top tech companies, the more talent comes along with them. You have to do what is right, and you have to communicate it too. The reality is that it is a vibrant institution, we're looking forward, we're successful, so therefore people want to join. We haven't had a problem attracting talent. 77% of our new hires into the corporate & investment bank last year were millennials, and they already make up more than 50% of the organization.

Turner: You're a big institution at a time when startups are considered cool and finance isn't as sexy as it once was. Don't you have to fight those perceptions?

Pinto: The industry might have been shrinking for a number of years, but we were not, so that is helpful. And technologists like challenges. An industry that is going through such a deep process transformation, where it has so much legacy tech that needs to be changed, when you have the challenge of moving from internal infrastructure to the cloud and you're redeveloping all the applications, that has its challenges. We're able to source people from tech companies, and they come here because they find these challenges interesting. I feel like we're in a good place.

Read the whole interview here.