JPMorgan Chase revs up payments lab hiring

Dive Brief:

• JPMorgan Chase is pumping up a hiring campaign at its new payments innovation lab in Greece this month after hiring Nikolas Choulakis as a managing director to head the Athens lab, the company said in an email to Payments Dive. Choulakis was hired in April, according to his LinkedIn profile.
• The Payments Innovation Lab will conduct research and development for the bank’s payments operations internationally and assist in creating products related to artificial intelligence, distributed-ledger technology and cryptography for payment systems, according to the press release.
• Choulakis will report to Mike Blandina, head of payments technology at JPMorgan, and Umar Farooq, CEO of JPMorgan’s Onyx unit. Prior to joining JPMorgan, Choulakis was the vice president of product development and innovation at Frontier Communications. He also created and led innovation labs at other companies, including Vodafone U.K., according to the announcement.

Dive Insight:

As part of the hiring spree, JPMorgan’s payments division is hosting a career event this month in Athens to woo engineers and technologists interested in working for the lab. In a post on his LinkedIn page, Choulakis put out a call for software engineers to apply and attend the Sept. 14 event.

With Choulakis at the helm, the lab is hiring new employees, such as product and engineering specialists, according to the announcement. His hiring follows JPMorgan’s expansion into Athens, Greece, in November 2022. At that time, the company said it planned to hire roughly 50 employees for the lab and sought real estate to accommodate its growing staff.

“Athens is one of the region’s emerging innovation hubs, and we are excited to tap into both the talent and expertise for the firm and our new Innovation Lab,” Choulakis said in the statement, calling jobs with the new lab a “compelling opportunity for technologists.” 

In addition to hiring a new leader and more employees for its lab, JPMorgan is also expanding its reach with respect to payments product features. Last month, the company introduced a tap-to-pay option on Apple’s iPhone for its U.S.-based merchants, enabling them to accept contactless payments using the phone, without additional hardware, according to a company press release. Sephora was the first major retailer to use the service at all of its U.S. locations, according to the announcement.

But as JPMorgan leans further into fintech, the bank has allegedly hit some bumps along the way. Following its acquisition of WePay in 2017 for $400 million, the bank struggled to integrate the startup into its operations, The Information reported in June following interviews with WePay employees.