Creating a Purpose-Driven Tech Culture at Chase

At Chase, we don’t just think of ourselves as a financial institution, but innovators building state-of-the-art applications, products and services with top-tier talent rivaling the largest tech companies in the world, many of whom we work with today. We’re in 60 million households in the U.S. and have nearly 59 million digital users, so our technologists have a unique opportunity to make an immediate and significant impact on a large customer base. We develop products that impact the financial health of our customers, while also making sure that they are easy to use for our customers. Because of our size and scale, our customer focus presents no shortage of challenges for technologists - not just for the “happy path” experiences but also for some of the most complex edge cases. 

To keep pace, we constantly reassess which tools our engineers use to create the digital experiences that millions of our customers rely on every day. Recognizing the importance of hardware that helps rather than hinders development is one of the drivers of success in tech. For example, we are progressively updating the hardware our mobile engineers use to take advantage of the latest processing power available on the market.

To bring great ideas to market quickly, organizations need to be flexible, collaborative and transparent as innovations can’t happen in a vacuum. Our Product, Technology, Design and Data teams work together throughout the product lifecycle so we can understand not just how we get to a finished product but also the “why” behind the product. 

Encouraging collaboration and interconnectivity among teams with different skills challenges us to create opportunities for those teams to learn from one another. We want our engineers to be familiar with design and our designers to understand engineering concepts. To promote this cross-functional knowledge sharing, we created a monthly learning series called DECODE that presents concepts like test automation and artificial intelligence to non-technologists in simple, easy-to-understand terms. Our ability to create products our customers want to use depends on our willingness to share information and understand the different languages we all speak. When we break down the barriers between engineering and design, between product and data, we start thinking and acting as a single unit, which allows us to move quickly from concept to implementation.

The best, most innovative ideas never have a chance to enter the market if the people working on them don’t have the resources and support to make real what they’ve imagined. Sure, those ideas might be cool and cutting-edge – they might even be revolutionary – but as long as they’re just ideas, they’ll never be as useful as something that already exists. Chase is an industry pace-setter in banking technology because we understand the importance of investing in our teams and removing the obstacles between cutting-edge concepts and the products we create for our customers.