JPMorgan is poaching talent from Silicon Valley

From Quartz

‘If you can’t beat them, hire them. That’s the strategy of JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon.

The chief executive of America’s biggest bank by assets has started plucking talent from Silicon Valley in an effort to beef up the its digital presence in everything from apps to mobile payments.

This new crop of JPMorgan execs comes with résumés touting senior positions at tech hubs such as Google and Yahoo, or computer science degrees, rather than traditional banking credentials. And they’re climbing aboard at the sprawling consumer bank as traditional financial institutions face their stiffest competition yet from the likes of digital payment systems, including Jack Dorsey‘s Square and Google Wallet.’

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Young Bankers Fed Up With 90-Hour Weeks Move to Startups

From Bloomberg

‘It was a Friday in the fall of 2004 and Umber Ahmad had been invited to read a poem at the wedding of one of her closest friends. She was planning to catch a 7 p.m. flight from New York to Toronto when a vice president at Morgan Stanley called her in. The client in a big merger deal needed work done over the weekend. A mergers and acquisitions specialist, Ahmad had no choice. She canceled the flight and started revising her analysis of the deal, Bloomberg Markets magazine will report in its June issue.

The missed wedding was just one of dozens of dinners, family get-togethers and other events that Ahmad did not attend as she worked 70- and 80-hour weeks as a young associate at Morgan Stanley and later as a vice president at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Ahmad, the Michigan-born daughter of a Pakistani doctor who taught at Harvard Medical School, likens the long hours and all-nighters to serving in the army.

“The military will show you that sleep deprivation is a form of torture,” she says. “Not being able to get regular sleep is a detriment to your life, to your health.” ‘

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Finance lost. Tech won. Here’s why…

“I failed at investment banking. And it wasn’t this soft, cheery type of failure that we celebrate in Silicon Valley. It was a real failure.

In 2004, I was part of an internship class of about 100 college juniors at Credit Suisse First Boston. All but one of them was offered a fulltime job at the bank. Guess who the exception was? The exception was me.” So writes Bryan Goldberg. <<READ MORE>>