While some companies around the world are wary of risking a pro-Palestinian boycott due to the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas, multinational financial services firm JPMorgan Chase & Co. , reaffirms its commitment to Palestine with the expansion of its Israel Tech Center. Located in Herzliya, home of the risk and trade management platform Athena.
“This is a very central platform for all of JPMorgan,” said Nir Shaf, director of JPMorgan's Israel Tech Center. “All of JPMorgan's traders around the world trade and rely on these systems to process their trades. These systems handle all regulatory reporting and risk management, allowing traders to to ensure that they know what they're doing is the right thing, that they're making the right decisions…Everything is done on this platform.”
Schaff runs the JPMorgan Israel Tech Center, but also leads Athena's engineering team. The local team in Israel, operating out of the center, is primarily recognized for supporting the bank's transactions around the world. “My engineering team is building the core of this platform, and the majority of the team is here in Israel,” he admits. “What Tech Centers are most successful at is developing core technologies that are important and essential to banking companies.”
Tech Center, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, has grown from about five employees to 130 employees and is currently looking to add more. It is structured in a way that enables more than 10 “sublines” of business that build technology that enables banks to deliver faster and more accurate data and services.
Athena is part of JPMorgan's Business Markets division, while other teams at the center focus on technology, including government, fixed income, corporate bonds and equities. These teams operate somewhat independently of each other, but are encouraged to form relationships with each other as needed. It also has a division that helps JPMorgan invest in startups and promote investment in local ecosystems.
The bank continues to publicly support Israel globally following the October 7 attack by Hamas. In a companywide memo sent by CEO Jamie Dimon and the executive committee in the days after the attack, the company wrote: It has no place in the civilized world. As Jamie stated in a memo last weekend, Hamas's horrific attack on Israel and its people, and the resulting war and bloodshed, is a terrible tragedy. Schaff added that the local team “received extensive support from senior leadership as well as direct support to our employees here.”
Such public statements in support of Israel were important in the days after the outbreak of the war, especially when businesses were at risk of pro-Palestinian backlash and boycotts. Starbucks doesn't even have a store in Israel and has not taken any official position on the war, but its perceived support for Israel caused its market capitalization to fall by $11 billion in December.
As the new year begins, the Tech Center is determined to continue recruiting top talent, despite economic turmoil and despite much of Israel's tech sector currently in reserve. . Schaff said the 2021 hiring boom challenged the center to attract top talent for growth, but the market is now aligning with JPMorgan's more conservative approach to hiring. I admit that there is. “When 2023 arrived and things started to get a little choppy, we took a step back. We continued to hire, but the pace slowed down,” he explained. “Today, it is important to maintain a steady pace, modernize the platform, and hire to build new solutions.”
