As the financial services sector advances and develops technology, it only makes sense that the largest banks will try to get ahead of the curve. And that’s exactly what JPMorgan Chase seems to be doing.
Friday, news broke that JPMorgan is building a Silicon Valley-based fintech campus to house 1,000 of its employees as the bank looks to keep ahead of the changing landscape of digital payments.
According to reporting from Reuters, the campus will open in 2020 and will be located in Palo Alto, California, at Stanford Research Park, on a plot of land that formerly housed Lockheed Martin. Reuters also reported that most of the employees at the campus will work for Chase Merchant Services division, the second-largest U.S. processor of card payments for merchants.
From the article:
Matt Kane, chief executive of JPMorgan’s merchant services division, said the bank was prepared to pay the high costs of operating in Silicon Valley for the chance to hire local software engineers. They are intended to complement payments industry specialists that JPMorgan employs now, largely in Plano, Texas, and Tampa, Florida.
The move to expand the bank’s reach in Silicon Valley comes a year after JPMorgan announced it was purchasing fintech startup WePay, a Silicon Valley-based firm specializing in payment software for bank networks. WePay now has about 275 employees, who will move to the new building, according to Reuters’ report.
This isn’t the only property change for the big bank. In February, the bank announced it was building a brand new, state-of-the-art headquarters in midtown Manhattan. Chase is building the new, 2.5 million square-foot, 70-story HQ at its 270 Park Avenue location, replacing the current 52-story building, which houses 15,000 of the bank’s employees. But construction isn’t happening just yet. It's expected to begin in 2019 and take approximately five years to complete.
