Now, a global bank holds a developer event in India

We got particularly excited by this story because, over the years, we’ve seen technology companies hold developer conferences – but a bank!JPMorganChase

held a developer conference for the first time in India recently – signifying how important software development has become to every company, how much they are in-housing this instead of outsourcing it, and how important India is in this ecosystem. The world’s largest bank (by market capitalisation) brought together 350 technologists from across its centres – mostly from India, but also some from overseas – in Hyderabad, with the objective of enabling its best engineers to learn from each other. Prior to this, the bank had held this conference, called DevUp, three times in its Plano, Texas, office.“We decided a year ago that we wanted to bring DevUp into India because a third of our engineering talent (over 20,000 of the total of 63,000) is here. Engineers love engaging with engineers all over the globe,”

Lori Beer

, the bank’s global chief information officer, told us when she came for the event. Various division CIOs nominate their best engineering talent to attend. Others are selected based on research abstracts they submit. AI was understandably a major discussion point. “One team was showing how they automate the software development build process and reduce the time to build by 50%. Another group was showing how to make disaster recovery faster with automation,” Lori said, noting that one engineer said she learned the software build process (from the presenting team), called her own team up, and had them implement the change immediately. “They did it last night. It's pretty amazing.”

The bank has previously said it has built close to $2 billion in business value in AI. This has come from areas like fraud prevention, personalisation in the consumer banking space, and providing more relevant information to clients in the asset and wealth management space.Lori said the bank is now looking at agentic AI, the architecture and platform required to build agents on top of existing systems.A lot of this work is happening in India. “One thing that’s incredibly impressive is that the teams here don't sit on the trading floors, it's a US consumer business, and yet they know the business. I think it comes from their ingenuity, their desire to really dive in and understand,” Lori said.

Software engrs one of the bank's biggest job families

Tech companies have developer conferences because they sell products for technologists to use. We're having them to learn from our own engineers. Software engineers are one of our biggest job families. We have over 300,000 people in JPMorganChase, and 60,000-plus are in technology. So we wanted to make sure we had a software engineering conference to build and develop not just leadership skills, but individual contributors’ software engineering skills. That makes sense given also that the foundation of most of our products and services is technology.

Lori Beer

Nothing like this in India

I haven't seen anybody else doing an internal developer conference on this scale in India. What we are doing in tech is absolutely cutting edge, and in that scenario, the event highlights the strategic importance of India.

Vibhavari Jahagirdar