Morning Coffee: The JPMorgan MD whose wife slept with her head on a desk to be near him. How’s Barclays’ banking revival going?
Every now and then you come across a banking story that deserves wider circulation, so it’s worth firing up Google Translate to read this article in La Repubblica. Marco Pistoia, the Global Head of Applied Research at JPMorgan, is widely known as a nice and humble guy, so it’s nice to see how happy he is to be profiled in his home newspaper.
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It’s also an interesting insight into JPMorgan, and into what Jamie Dimon is getting for his $17bn tech budget. Pistoia is not your average banking IT guy – he has 622 patents to his name, including 100 in the field of quantum computing.
His job seems to be split into two parts. “Applied Research” apparently means running a team that goes “walking around the bank, listening to problems, collecting data and creating algorithms to solve them”. And in his other role as Head of Quantum Computing, he seems to be mainly working on things that will future-proof JPM in the event of a sudden leap forward that renders all currently existing cryptography useless. According to Marco Pistoia, this might happen as soon as 2030.
How do you get a job like this? It seems that the answer is in this respect much more typical of high-flying banking tech careers – you have to combine a pretty high level of mathematical ability with an absolutely extraordinary work ethic. Having realized that maths was the thing he was best at, Pistoia got a job in IBM working in Sardinia. Pretty soon after, he was talent spotted and transferred to North Carolina, where according to the profile “he started working like crazy”.
Crazy seems to be the word; during these years, his wife apparently came into the office at night and slept on a chair with her head on
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