In this episode of Pay It Forward, host Adam Garbooshian, Head of Business Architecture, Payments Channels, sits down with Sri Shivananda, Chief Information Officer at J.P. Morgan Payments, for an energizing conversation about leadership, innovation, and why Sri believes payments is one of the most dynamic and impactful spaces to build a career today. Together, they explore the trust-powered foundation of J.P. Morgan Payments, the transformative potential of AI, and how real-time payments are reshaping customer expectations globally. Listeners will hear firsthand how Sri is cultivating a high-performing, inclusive tech culture grounded in learning, curiosity, and resilience. Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of J.P. Morgan, its affiliates, or its employees. The information set forth herein has been obtained or derived from sources believed to be reliable. Neither the author nor J.P. Morgan makes any representations or warranties as to the information’s accuracy or completeness. The information contained herein has been provided solely for informational purposes and does not constitute an offer, solicitation, advice or recommendation, to make any investment decisions or purchase any financial instruments, and may not be construed as such. Any mentions of third-party trademarks, brand names, products and services are for referential purposes only and any mention thereof is not meant to imply any sponsorship, endorsement, or affiliation.© 2025 JPMorgan Chase & Co. All Rights Reserved.
In this episode of Pay It Forward, host Adam Garbooshian, Head of Business Architecture, Payments Channels, sits down with Sri Shivananda, Chief Information Officer at J.P. Morgan Payments, for an energizing conversation about leadership, innovation, and why Sri believes payments is one of the most dynamic and impactful spaces to build a career today. Together, they explore the trust-powered foundation of J.P. Morgan Payments, the transformative potential of AI, and how real-time payments are reshaping customer expectations globally. Listeners will hear firsthand how Sri is cultivating a high-performing, inclusive tech culture grounded in learning, curiosity, and resilience.
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of J.P. Morgan, its affiliates, or its employees. The information set forth herein has been obtained or derived from sources believed to be reliable. Neither the author nor J.P. Morgan makes any representations or warranties as to the information’s accuracy or completeness. The information contained herein has been provided solely for informational purposes and does not constitute an offer, solicitation, advice or recommendation, to make any investment decisions or purchase any financial instruments, and may not be construed as such. Any mentions of third-party trademarks, brand names, products and services are for referential purposes only and any mention thereof is not meant to imply any sponsorship, endorsement, or affiliation.© 2025 JPMorgan Chase & Co. All Rights Reserved.
Narrator (00:02):
Welcome to Pay It Forward, a podcast by J.P. Morgan Payments for J.P. Morgan Payments. Get to know our business and gain a better understanding of where we sit at the intersection of technology and finance. Did you know we move over $10 trillion dollars globally each day through over 170 countries and 120 currencies at more than 5,000 transactions per second? Join us as we take you inside the stories, technology, and people that make it all happen.
Adam Garbooshian (00:39):
Welcome to Pay It Forward, a podcast by J.P. Morgan Payments for J.P. Morgan Payments. My name is Adam Garbooshian and I have the pleasure to be joined today by a truly visionary leader and colleague, Sri Shivananda. I've been with the bank for 19 years, the entire time within the payment space, so I'm very excited to have the opportunity to sit down with our CIO. And today, we're exploring the powerful role technology plays in driving innovation across the payment space. What makes our culture distinct and how Sri's leadership philosophy help shape the future of our business and teams. Sri, welcome to the show.
Sri Shivananda (01:17):
Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be here.
Adam Garbooshian (01:19):
To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about your current role and journey, and what brought you to J.P. Morgan Payments?
Sri Shivananda (01:27):
I'm the CIO for J.P. Morgan Payments. I support the payments business and support all kinds of clients around the world. I joined J.P. Morgan itself about more than a year ago. I came into the role as a global CTO. And when this role showed up in the beginning of 2025, I jumped at the opportunity. For a payments geek, there is no better place to be. This is the most exciting place I can be working at.
Adam Garbooshian (01:53):
Great. How has your path in technology evolved over time?
Sri Shivananda (01:57):
The fact that I sit here is actually an accident. As a teenager, I wanted to be a pilot in the Indian Air Force. But then, I fell in love with computing very early in my career. I was offered an opportunity as a teenager to either buy a motorcycle or a computer. I bought a computer. And, fell in love with it so much. And I happened to be the only person my age that had a computer at home. Started by writing software on it. And then, eventually, started to get interested in the internals. I would open the computer up, put it back together. By the second year of owning a computer, I was actually making and selling computers at that point in time. Later in life, when I started my career, I took on roles as a software programmer. I have never looked back. I've gone into every area of technology that you can think of. I've been in infrastructure, cybersecurity, platforms, built applications, and mobile applications for the customers. Done the north to south and east to west of tech. I am what you'd call a geek and I'm proud to be.
Adam Garbooshian (02:59):
I love that. And you're in good company here as a payments geek. On that note, what are you most passionate about right now in your work?
Sri Shivananda (03:07):
One, being somebody that runs the technology for the largest payments platform on the planet. That's an exciting role in itself. I stand on the shoulders of great people who built these platforms over many, many decades. And yet, what I see is an amazing opportunity, with respect to everything that's happening in the payments ecosystem across the world, customer expectations are changing, business models are changing, regulations around the world are changing, the way money is bold and managed is changing. And in the midst of all that change, there is this wave of change around AI and everything that's happening around leveraging data. We bring all of that together with great talent and that unleashes an opportunity where we can take our current position as the leaders in financial services and distance ourselves so far, there's nobody in our rear view mirror. The fact that I get to do it gets me to spring out of bed every morning to come to work. And every day when I leave, I'm satisfied I learn something new and I did a little bit to contribute towards that.
Adam Garbooshian (04:06):
Fantastic. Where do you see payments heading as an industry?
Sri Shivananda (04:10):
A lot going on in the payment industry. Over the last two decades, what we've seen is the consumer experiences in our payments have improved significantly. For a consumer, the ability to manage and move money has become extremely simple, very convenient, and very secure. To the point where you can walk into a store and tap your phone, it's done. In many cases, you want to take a subway ride, you flash your phone on the way in through the gate. Now, I would say, payments are becoming ambient. They're beginning to disappear. If you took a ride-share or something of that nature, ask yourself when you paid, and the answer will be that you didn't. You expressed the intent for a ride, you took the ride, the ride finished, the payment happened.
(04:55):
So payment has gone from being a frictionful activity that happened at the end of every shopping funnel, to now beginning to disappear. And the ultimate act of sophistication and payments, or for that matter, anything is its disappearance, right? At the same time, the substrate of payments, the machinery, the engine room of payments has not changed much in many decades. And that is beginning to disrupt now. Things are beginning to change. You've heard about the concept of digital ledgers and what's happening with blockchain technologies and so on. That is beginning to shape how the future of money movement will occur, which will start to, one, include more people in the economy, but also, at the same time make payments a lot more faster and real-time than it has been in the past. Collectively, there are two things that come from it. Amazing customer experience, ease in security, but at the same time, the efficiency and the economics of payments are also going to improve in the favor of customers as we go forward.
Adam Garbooshian (06:02):
So with that evolving landscape, how do you position our tech team to play a strategic role in driving out the innovation required to keep up in the marketplace?
Sri Shivananda (06:14):
We are a 225-year-old firm that has built an amazing set of technology over time. We serve the planet with payments, with money management, and money movement. The first thing we have to do as an organization is to make sure that we uphold all of that. We take the trust that everyone before us has built on behalf of the firm, and continue to keep it great, and continue to build from there as well. So job number one is to make sure that we sustain really well everything that we have built out to now, all because that has helped us become number one.
(06:51):
Now, second thing we need to do is I thought about all of that change happening in the ecosystem. We need to tune into that change, understand that change, and understand the opportunities that those changes actually provide us. Third, use that as a strategy to create the roadmaps to go after those things, and continue to further differentiate ourselves from the rest of the people in the industry. And last but not least, value, delivery, and execution is extremely important. It's not just about having the right compass in the direction you want to go in, but you need to have an amazing engine to execute. And executing that way puts us far from everyone else. Outcompeting the industry is what this is about. And we are in a great place to do that.
Adam Garbooshian (07:40):
Excellent. So maybe a little call-out here to Spider-Man, with great innovation comes great responsibility, right? With that in mind, how do you create guardrails that allow teams to push the envelope, take risks, innovate, but still protect our clients and business, which I think is one of the major differentiators for us, is the trust that our clients have with us. How do you enable those guardrails?
Sri Shivananda (08:06):
You're absolutely right, and you said the magic word. In financial services, we all believe we are in the business of money. We are actually in the business of trust, and there's trust that we built with our customers and all our stakeholders, including governments, regulators, and various other people over time. We have to keep that up. We have to continue to build on it. Trust takes a long time to build and it's very easy to erode and lose. And we can't afford to do that. That means, you take great care in everything that you innovate on. Innovation is about disrupting the status quo and making progress. But at the same time, we need to do it with the mindset of ensuring that it is right for the customer. It is right for every other stakeholder that we need to support in the world, governments, regulators, and other institutions. It's right for the society. It's right for the firm. And it's right for our teams.
(09:03):
And that is naturally ingrained in a place like J.P. Morgan Payments. We take that very, very seriously. And, as we do our software development lifecycle, we make sure we have the right checkpoints to ensure that not only are we building the right security, and reliability, and resilience, of course, we are building award-winning features, but in going to market, doing it in a way that we take every aspect of the customer into mind as we put it in front of them, learn from it every day, and improve it every single day.
Adam Garbooshian (09:37):
So Sri, you mentioned AI earlier and it's one of those things that everyone is talking about. How do you see AI playing within our payment space?
Sri Shivananda (09:48):
AI is an exciting development. It's a five-decade old technology, but we've seen AI summer come through in the last two years. I feel that the potential of AI and the opportunity with it is only limited by our imagination. Every aspect of technology is going to undergo a change. And at this moment, all of us in the technology space are beginning to embrace it, learn what it is, how we can start to leverage it, how we can start to apply it on behalf of the customer, on behalf of the firm, and to actually be more productive. At the same time, it is extremely powerful. And it's important that while we innovate, we do it in a way that is safe, it's ethical, it's right, and it looks around the corner to see what disadvantages it may bring and put the right mitigation, so we leverage the power, but do it right as well.
Adam Garbooshian (10:40):
Thanks for that, Sri. It feels like we could dedicate an entire episode just to AI. Shifting gears a bit, let's talk about your internal team and what it takes to be successful in this industry. What do you see as the key ingredients of a high-performing team?
Sri Shivananda (10:57):
At the core of a high-performing team is a learning and growth mindset. That means you start with a culture that's a safe space for everybody to speak their mind, contribute, and learn. One that treats mistakes more as a learning opportunity to get forward, versus something to avoid. And, along with that, it has to be a culture where everyone gets to thrive. That means it's a solid cultural foundation. There is one where competence is rich and continuously improving, but it has character. As in, when things go right and when things go wrong. When things go right, you remain humble. And when things go wrong, you remain humble, but you become a learner. You pick up from that and you make sure that you get better from what happened there.
(11:42):
So I would say, all of those ingredients are important. It starts in great talent. It perseveres through a learning mindset and it's a journey in excellence. And a journey in excellence is one where it's never a destination. What you do every day matters. How you feel about what you did every day matters. And being proud but not satisfied creates just infinite capacity and infinite opportunity.
Adam Garbooshian (12:05):
So everybody speaks about their day job, they're busy. How do you foster a culture from kind of a top-down mentality to foster that environment of continuous learning and push people to want to have that level of curiosity?
Sri Shivananda (12:19):
In building our culture, leadership matters a lot. It's this tone you set from the top. It's the things that you do every single day. It's what you do in moments when everyone is watching all the time. And in moments, the act that you pursue, the thought that you share, the coaching that you do, the nudging that you do, all that matters. Creating a safe space for everyone is the most important part to inclusion.
(12:45):
And, once you do that, then people are willing to speak their mind and willing to share things that they otherwise feel inconvenient. All of that together brings the best ideas forward. Innovation comes from great ideas clashing with each other. Every moment is a teaching moment. And as a leader, you need to tap into that. You need to set up great examples, remain vulnerable because you make mistakes too, but in doing so, show people that being that way is fine. You don't need to have all strengths. When you do that, sky's the limit. When you take a growth mindset and you take an improvement mindset, continuous a proven mindset, there is no limit to what you can achieve.
Adam Garbooshian (13:28):
I've heard you say leadership is 25% IQ and 50% EQ. I'm not sure what the last 25% is, but could you share what that means to you?
Sri Shivananda (13:38):
Absolutely. I'll expand that a little bit. What I've observed over time in leadership, particularly observing other successful leaders navigate strategies, navigate organizations, and build great businesses is that there are four components for success. IQ, which is intelligence quotient. You differentiate yourself strategically by applying that into a business. Then, there is EQ, which is emotional quotient. That's five things. It's awareness of yourself, awareness of others, communication, contract management, and organisational savvy. That together allows you to solve any problem along with leading people and creating followership. Third, equally important is curiosity quotient or CQ. This is your ability to look at everything in business, in product, and technology about people, organisations in the world and be a continuous learner. You learn every single day. Each day, you pick up something new and you become better.
(14:38):
But there's a fourth and important component that is grit or tenacity. Life will knock you down. Your career will knock you down. Business will knock you down. And when that happens, what do you do? Get up. You dust yourself off. You keep going. That ability in itself is a huge distinguisher. All for together, I think IQ is important, but that's about 25%. EQ is the main ingredient for a leader, that's 50%. CQ is another 25%. And grit is what you need to hit a step function shift in your career when something goes wrong. You pull back and you project forward.
Adam Garbooshian (15:16):
Thank you for that insight. If there's one thought or message you hope the listeners will walk away from after this conversation, what would it be?
Sri Shivananda (15:25):
Money and payments is an industry where there's a lot happening right now. While we have seen two decades of amazing consumer disruption and great experiences, there is so much more to be done with the payment substrate and what's happening there. Real-time payments are imminent, payments are going to get easier, more economical, include more people in the economy. All of that is great for the world that we live in.
(15:49):
At the same time, as J.P. Morgan Payments, we are in an amazing place. And we are so because of the amazing heritage and culture of this company and the innovation that we are pursuing. This is a fantastic place to be in. I worked in the tech industry for a long period of time. I joined JPMP about a year ago. I thought in about a year I'd fit in. But now, I feel like I belong. I'm a part of this mission. And I think, it's a great place to build a career. It's a great place to build technology. It's a great place to innovate. And, with this kind of distributed scale, it's fantastic to see how little things you do can have a massive impact.
Adam Garbooshian (16:29):
Thank you very much. So let's wrap on a fun note. What's something about you people would never guess? Maybe something that's not on your LinkedIn profile.
Sri Shivananda (16:37):
I think that would be that I understand five languages, speak four, read three, and write two. And by the way, these are not computer science languages. These are actual spoken languages.
Adam Garbooshian (16:50):
Wow. Five languages. I have a tough time with one. That's great. Sri, thank you for giving us a behind the scenes look at the tech, culture, and leadership that come together at J.P. Morgan Payments. And to our listeners, thanks for tuning in. We hope this conversation sparks new ideas, fuels your curiosity, and inspires you to lead with purpose, and of course, pay it forward. Until next time.
Narrator (17:17):
Thank you for tuning in to Pay It Forward, a podcast by J.P. Morgan Payments for J.P. Morgan Payments. Stay up to date on the latest stories, technology, and people powering payments by subscribing on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favourite podcast platform. Keep pushing boundaries and we'll keep moving the payments world forward one transaction at a time.
Sources:
1 “Did you know we move over $10 trillion globally each day through over 170 countries and 120 currencies at more than 5,000 transactions per second?” (Chairman and CEO Letter to Shareholders)