Jamie Dimon Wants This Guy to Disrupt JPMorgan
Meet David Hudson, tasked with building innovation inside the bank to protect it from outside threats. His title might as well be chief disruption officer
David Hudson exhaled slowly and decided to take the leap. He’d just been promoted to a new job that put him in charge of spearheading disruption within JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s trading businesses. Now he stood before Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon in the 48th floor boardroom of the company’s Park Avenue headquarters in Manhattan to see what he could get away with. If the bank really wanted to anticipate clients’ needs and attempt risky moonshot projects, he told Dimon, his budget had to expand: “I want an extra $50 million.”
After five minutes of questioning, Dimon gave the go-ahead. Then came the hard part. For the first moonshot that Hudson, 42, had in mind—a platform to liberate asset managers and smaller banks from having to employ traders—JPMorgan had to switch into aggressive hiring mode. Recruiters would be needed, at least 10 of them, to find the coders and traders to build and operate the system. Office space had to be found to house the group and salesmen to hawk the thing once it existed.