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When Sri Shivananda arrived at JPMorgan Chase in June 2024, he took a high-profile role at the largest U.S. bank as global chief technology officer. But it wasn’t for long.
When an IT colleague for the company’s payments division, Mike Blandina, left his post as chief information officer for payments (landing as CIO at Snowflake), Shivananda was quick to shift to that role, now overseeing technology operations for that business.
While his new job isn’t a firmwide one, he now has a larger purview in the massive payments division, overseeing about 8,000 employees, more than twice as many as in his initial post.
The payments business generated $18.1 billion in revenue for the company last year, operating in about 160 countries, and processing some $10 trillion payments daily.
Shivananda’s marching orders are to enhance the bank’s technology infrastructure for payments with respect to its treasury services, merchant services, embedded finance and other fintech software, the company said.
He calls himself a “payments geek,” and that seems to be an apt moniker, given his 20-plus years of experience at digital pioneer PayPal, including as chief technology officer, and at its former parent, online marketplace eBay.
Payments Dive this month picked Shivananda’s brain as to his outlook for everything from fraud to stablecoins to real-time payments.
Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
PAYMENTS DIVE: What are your thoughts about how banks can better communicate with each other to combat fraud?
SRI SHIVANANDA: On the cybersecurity front, there is sharing that happens across the industry, as sponsored by a body called CISA (the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency in the U.S. Homeland Security Department). That is a government-sponsored approach to sharing the right kind of information to make sure that we are fighting on that front together. At the same time, on fraud, we have a competitive advantage on the data that we see through the number of transactions that we support on the platform … and run that processing to make sure that it’s a safe transaction for all parties involved.
Do you have any thoughts on what JPMorgan's role might be in stablecoins?
Stablecoins have been a conversation in the industry, and continue to be a growing conversation, particularly given everything that’s happening with the current (Trump) administration. We are staying close to that. We are paying close attention to the business possibilities there, and also the commercial opportunities that could play in that area. I have history from the past on stablecoins: At PayPal, we did launch a stablecoin. But at this moment, while it’s part of an active conversation, there's nothing that I can share.