JPMorgan’s head of transaction services for Europe, Middle East and Africa talks about career progression, joining up services for clients and what makes JPMorgan different from other banks.
Mobility is one of the buzzwords of the technology and transactions industry, which focuses less on the mobile device – such as a smartphone or tablet – but more on facilitating transactions on the move, regardless of the method.
But when Sue Dean, head of transaction services for Europe, Middle East and Africa at JPMorgan talks about mobility, she means something different altogether.
The mobility she speaks of is about career progression and being able to move from one seemingly different role to another within the same organisation. Her own career is a case in point. Ms Dean moved to treasury services operations in 2007 from JPMorgan's investor services division, and then moved into her current product role at the end of 2012.
Career mobility
For Ms Dean, this career mobility is one of the factors that distinguishes JPMorgan from other banks. She plays an active role in developing the careers of other people with an emphasis on creating opportunities for women. I believe her because during our meeting she seems genuinely interested in my career path and goals. This is the second time this has happened to me – where an interview morphs into a mentoring session – and the other time it was also with a senior female executive at JPMorgan.
Ms Dean says that the mobility of employees also falls in line with the bank’s restructuring in 2012, which brought corporate banking, investment banking and treasury services together under the umbrella of JPMorgan’s corporate and investment bank (CIB). Mobility within the organisation, says Ms Dean, “is really the forerunner to CIB and bringing the teams together and presenting the clients with the single face of JPMorgan”.
A common frustration for clients of any bank, she notes, has been how they have to deal with many people from different divisions in the bank. “There is a huge drive from the top [of JPMorgan] to join up the service end to end for the clients,” she says. “There is an expectation here that you must know your business – and you must know it fully – and you must know your colleagues.” This expectation, combined with the mobility of people within the bank, “creates a stimulating environment”, says Ms Dean.
She believes there are more similarities than differences between her current product role and previous position in operations. She gives the example that in product and operations, you need to be able to manage people and enable them to be successful. A product manager also needs to know operations and vice versa. But when it comes to strategy, “then it becomes different,” she says. In operations it is more about how to be more efficient, but in her current role “the strategy is around what the markets are doing, what clients are doing, what the client needs are,” she says.
Momentum of change
Ms Dean comments on how the momentum of regulatory change has accelerated, particularly in the months since she took on her current position. Now working in a product-based role, she says the pace of regulation on the product role was greater than she first anticipated.
“It has been a journey,” she says. “What is interesting is how regulations can start in one location and then have applicability in others,” she says. She comments that it has been difficult to shield clients from the regulatory onslaught and the focus has been on “how to get on the front foot, how we can make sure we drive the dialogue and lead clients on a journey so that we are making it rhythmic rather than ‘another one and then another one’”.
The Single Euro Payments Areas (SEPA), she says “most definitely absorbed the focus in 2013”. So does this mean SEPA has moved down the to-do list for 2014? “SEPA is still front and fore,” she says. “We are equally occupied with SEPA this year – we are in the middle of the migration,” she says.
Although the deadline has been extended, it has not been applied uniformly across the markets in Europe, which adds another layer of complexity to the migration process. Also, says Ms Dean, the reality of standardisation has yet to come through. She gives the example of return codes not being applied equally, which means a client may have returns from a couple of banks with the same code, but each carrying a different meaning.
But rather than just being focused on complying with the SEPA deadlines, clients are now looking ahead to the long-term benefits of a single payments market in Europe. “We are definitely having conversations about centralising and the opportunities [of SEPA]. Clients are clearly thinking about the next phase while working through the last phase of migration. We are seeing a shift towards reflection and the opportunity of the SEPA environment,” she says.
