JPMorgan's head of asset management explains how he's been able to poach workers from Silicon Valley

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JPMorgan's head of asset management explains how he's been able to poach workers from Silicon Valley

Chris Willcox

JPMorgan Asset Management

Chris Willcox, the head of JPMorgan Asset Management.

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  • Chris Willcox, the head of JPMorgan Asset Management, explained in an interview with Business Insider how he competes for technology talent.
  • In August, the firm hired Apoorv Saxena, Google's head of project management for artificial intelligence.
  • Tech talent likes the huge opportunities at banks that have historically lagged behind Silicon Valley firms, Willcox said.

While workers' moves from Wall Street to tech firms like Google and Uber grab headlines, some banking executives are seeing that trend reverse.

So said Chris Willcox, the president of JPMorgan Asset Management, who told Business Insider in a December interview that the firm was luring talent from Silicon Valley.

"Those people are enthusiastic about being in our industry," he said.

Willcox's division, which oversaw $1.7 trillion as of September 30, has made a "significant investment" in artificial intelligence in the past year and a half, he said.

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Over the summer, the firm poached Apoorv Saxena, Google's head of product management for AI, who's now JPMorgan's head of AI and machine-learning services and its head of asset and wealth management AI technology. He's based in Palo Alto, California, where JPMorgan is building a fintech campus for more than 1,000 employees set to open in 2020.

In September, Saxena also tapped a former Facebook engineer, Yang Wang, who's now JPMorgan's executive director of applied AI engineering.

Read more: Inside JPMorgan Chase's New York City tech office - the 'mothership' of the bank's $10.8 billion digital ambitions

Banks have for years suffered from using legacy infrastructure that needs to be updated, presenting opportunities to technologists looking for new challenges that they may not be able to find in Silicon Valley, Willcox said.

"If you're a smart young person in this space, asset managers and banks are places with huge amounts of data that probably haven't maximized the application of that to their businesses," he said. "Like any smart person who's ambitious, what you're really looking for is the opportunity set - and the opportunity sets in our industry are huge, and the end client need is huge."

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Willcox's team of data scientists has come up with 11 ideas for how to use artificial intelligence in the business, with six of them in development, he said. Most of the group's work focuses on integrating data science in the investment process, but it's becoming increasingly important for helping clients understand their portfolios.

JPMorgan's chief information officer, Lori Beer, told Business Insider earlier this year that she oversaw 50,000 technologists and an annual tech spend of $10.8 billion.

In the asset-management space, about a quarter of BlackRock's 14,000 employees, or 3,500 people, work as technologists, BlackRock's chief financial officer, Gary Shedlin, said earlier this month, adding that the firm spends about $1 billion on technology. Meanwhile, Fidelity has said it spends about $2.5 billion annually on technology, with 30% of its 40,000 employees in tech.

Get the latest JPM stock price here.

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