Episode Two: Lori Beer and Elinda Welsh, JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Attract, retain, promote

Currently, women represent about a quarter of the computer science workforce. Beer understands why and as Chief Information Officer for JPMorgan Chase, she has led the strategy to put an end-to-end solution in place for young women.  Elinda Welsh, one of the strategy’s benefactors, is a software engineer who is on the fast track for new, exciting and challenging opportunities.  Elinda’s opportunities started with an internship back in Glasgow, and following that was tapped to participate in a variety of highly coordinated and focused skills-based programs.  Along the way she received critical support provided by mentors, technology leaders and business managers. In this episode, two successful women in technology share their experiences and perspectives from uniquely different ends of the career spectrum.

Technology: From a bank’s perspective

From a cross-enterprise point of view, Lori’s global organization of industry experts are tasked with ensuring the integrity of the organization’s data.  This translates into three overarching priorities for Lori and her team; protecting customers, clients and the firm. They spend the majority of their energies focusing on data use, data rights, A.I. and cyber security.  In the consumer space, Lori touches on the work they are doing to improve client experiences by providing more virtual assistance capabilities and intuitive credit cards.  For the latter, their goal is to lower potential fraudulent activity by making credit cards innately and preemptively ‘smarter’.

Brightest and smartest

With the growing need to attract top talent, it doesn’t hurt to have an annual working budget of $11 billion and over 50k technologists globally.  Lori’s organization is constantly scouting for bright minds and high achievers and believes JPMorgan Chase’s industry leading position in technology creates a competitive advantage.  This advantage gives her team the ability to gather extensive thought leadership and diverse perspectives For Lori, the competitive differentiators boil down to having the capacity to engage top talent, deliver seamless execution and provide a collaborative environment.