Pay It Forward: A Podcast by J.P. Morgan Payments

Silent Night: Behind the Scenes of Peak Payments Season

Episode Summary

In this episode of Pay It Forward, hosts Mike Blandina and Mike Lozanoff discuss the high-stakes, fast-paced world at J.P. Morgan Payments and the critical work required to keep payments seamless—even during peak days like Black Friday.

Episode Notes

In this episode of Pay It Forward, hosts Mike Blandina and Mike Lozanoff discuss the high-stakes, fast-paced world at J.P. Morgan Payments and the critical work required to keep payments seamless—even during peak days like Black Friday. Hear insights into bridging technology and business, the importance of “silent nights” during high transaction periods, and the intense preparation that supports over 450 million daily transactions. Join us for a look behind the scenes at how what it takes to keep the global payments system running smoothly.

Additional Resources:
Mike Blandina's LinkedIn

Mike Lozanoff's LinkedIn

 

Episode Transcription

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 nearly $10 trillion 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 today. We've got a double mic feature. First up, Mike Blandina, Global Head of Payments Technology, followed by Mike Lozanoff, Global Head of Merchant Services. Yes, same name and almost the same voice. Mike Blandina, the mic is yours.

Welcome to the Pay It Forward Podcast. I'm Mike Blandina. I've been with JPMorgan for just over four and a half years, and I have spent 36 years in the payments and commerce business, so I've spent my entire career there. Mike, why don't you tell the story of the night I called you with a new opportunity in your career?

Thanks, Mike. Appreciate the introduction. So Mike called me on Super Bowl Sunday for those in the US a pretty big day. It's a big sporting day, and he sends me a message, saying, Hey, can you talk at halftime? At this point, I was working for one of Mike's direct reports. The boss's boss wants to talk to you, but I had to tell him like one, we don't talk at halftime of the Super Bowl. He had a level set. That's the big show. We got to watch that. But ultimately, Mike and I chatted and he asked me if I was emotionally and physically prepared to take on a really important payment system for the merchant business. And I remember these words vividly, and I tell the story a lot with him and he laughs because running a silent merchant acquiring business, it's a big commitment. You worry about every minute you can never turn off.

There are no close credit cards that have to work around the clock, and I appreciate the opportunity. It was amazing. I started here early in my career right out of college doing card issuing and now acquiring for Mike. Now, I'll tell you a little bit, it's like working for Mike, working for a 36-year payments veteran who came into one of my team meetings at one point and could start to talk about the iso bitmap for those payments nerds out there, the 85, 83 bitmaps. He remembered different values of them and I said, boy, this is going to be a lot easier working for somebody who can understand this level of detail, what we're doing day in, day out. And I would probably say that to you, Mike. It's pretty easy to work with you demanding, but when I need to explain something, it's nice to have someone who understands the business as much as the tech.

Well, it's good to get a compliment. I still remember that night, trying to get you on the phone during the Super Bowl. And so technology is the product in payments and what we sell is technology. And I was looking for people who could cross the chasm between product and business and technology because they're so tightly woven together in the payments business. And I very quickly saw Mike had the ability to speak multiple languages. He could speak business and product and strategy and technology. So I looked for an opportunity for Mike to sort of help cross that chasm for the broader payments technology. One of the things we should talk about just briefly and then we'll jump into the Silent Night topic, is this is a space where we're looking for talent. We're doing 450 million transactions a day, five to 600 million in peak season, and we need people who are committed to engineering at a very high-speed level and with critical delivery points when we shut down, the world doesn't operate.

I mean, we move that much movie every day, right? And the intro talks about the 10 trillion a day. So this is a space where you can spend 36 years. And Mike's example, he joined right out of college and has been with JP Morgan ever since and spent most of that time in the payments business. So I tell engineers all the time that it's not only okay to be really specific in your engineering career, but find a place like payments or markets or health insurance where you can be an industry expert and be a technologist all at

The same time. One of the things I like to say when I talk to engineers is you have to really enjoy extreme engineering. This is a high throughput, low latency, fall-tolerant business. It's not like just building a webpage. You have to do this stuff at scale. It's in a really exciting place to be.

When I joined the company, one of the things I noticed was there were too many walls between business and product and technology. One of my early objectives was to be able to blend that so that when you talk to someone from our payments group, it was going to be difficult for the outside world to understand whether they were talking to a product person or a technology person because in payments, the technology is the product. So it takes a lot to make sure that that level of money moves on time on cost and is done smoothly as much straight through money movement as we can do. Mike, can you just talk a little bit about, when we talk about Silent Night, what does that mean to you?

I like to say merchant acquiring should be this invisible product because it sits between that checkout button or terminal and the consumer is getting approved. And if we're not silent, it gets very emotional very quickly because you sit between that merchant or business and their revenue stream and it escalates really fast. That was definitely a side of it, Mike, I had not faced in the engineering job. So Mike, how do you manage?

From a business perspective, the cost between on-prem, you almost have to build to your peak day and pay for that throughout the year. How do you deal with that in cloud versus on-prem, and do you have flexibility? Is there a difference there in terms of how you manage the spend of your tech there?

Yeah, this is a big area for us that I'm finding will be much more efficient in the future. As Mike said, when you run all these big servers and you have to go buy them, you buy for your peak day and a lot of time it sits and sometimes you try and load balance across different data centers. We're processing across three different ones across the globe in case of redundancy and failure, and that can be expensive. It's time-consuming to set up in the cloud. Now we try and keep it a little bit more managed. We can within hours spin up different environments. We can decide to go to different regions more in terms of probably measured in days and weeks. We want to go to an entirely different zone in the cloud, but for now, it's a much different speed, more expensive in a way to keep all of that computing sitting around on-prem. And I think the future will help us drive some efficiency as we go to the cloud.

You talked about three different data centers. What's the objective there and what does that buy you from a resiliency perspective for your customers?

So first off, when you run a service, and that's called an authorization service, consumers may be out there or employees listening to this, right? You swipe your card, you want it to work. You don't always know how long it's going to take to post on your bank statement at the end of the month. So some of those services we run, we don't run in three data centres because it's expensive to do. So it's a little bit of you pick what you need to run and then you deploy those assets or those applications in these different data centers. Now keeping them in sync operationally with data replication, you really want a client to be connected to all three because if one goes down, it should be transparent to them that the other two just pick it up seamlessly. And the idea of really getting to three for us was when you're in just two, there will always be some sort of maintenance or network item or issue that could happen in one data center, and then you really get to a single point of failure. So for us, a number of years ago, we decided it made sense for our business to go to three and potentially even four in certain applications so that not only do we keep geographic redundancy, we keep different infrastructure and networks in there, different servers. Keeping all those in sync is quite the engineering feat, but that's really the reason to go to a multi-network type of deployment.

So basically if one of your data centers goes down or you have an issue, the traffic just dynamically routes to the other two. The customers don't even see the outage. That is the plan. That is the idea of being silent when the Christmas music starts playing on all the radio stations. As you hear the song silent night, you'll think of Mike and I and a whole different perspective on the value of a quiet evening to us. Usually when it's really quiet and it's silent, that means all of our systems are running well and just know that our team has spent the entire year getting ready for that. And our objective is for it to be completely quiet for you as well as our customers

And our partners. My wish for the holiday is to not ever see on my phone on Christmas Eve or Black Friday or Cyber Monday, Mike Blandina's phone number pop up, or by head of technology operations. I don't want to see those numbers because then typically we don't want to call each other because we get a little antsy when we see that number. I'm sure. Mike, you feel the same. You don't want to see mine pop up on your cell phone on the day after Thanksgiving, do you? No, I don't.

So thank you everyone. I hope you got a lot from this and you'll get a better perspective on how we get through the holiday season. Thank you.

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.