Paul Gladigau, the managing director and head of technology for JP Morgan Worldwide Securities Services wants to make the business more agile. To that end he’s pushing forward with a plan to roll out the Agile development approach across the business to replace more traditional waterfall development programmes which have previously dominated.
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JP Morgan WSS is owned by US based financial giant JP Morgan Chase which made headlines recently when it announced it had suffered a $US2 billion loss as a result of a poor hedging strategy.
Given its mandate JP Morgan WSS needs sophisticated and reliable technology to provide a window on the assets it oversees so that everyone knows where they are and – crucially - what they are worth every minute of every day. No-one wants any nasty sudden surprises with their superannuation or investment portfolio.
Gladigau is charged with making sure WSS’s technology infrastructure is reliable and robust. The company has invested $US1.8billion on technology for the WSS business globally in the last two years and earmarked $A30m to be spent this and next year on enhancements in Australia.
Gladigau’s introduction to JP Morgan was as a client; when he was CIO at Barclays Global Investors, which used JP Morgan as funds custodian. He understands the pain points for WSS customers.
“I had a chance to get to know the management team here and got to know them over five years,” said Gladigau. “The conversation was more around ‘how are we fitting in with your business models – are we hitting all those pebbles in your shoes we need to deal with’, rather than ‘here are your services and we hit the five SLAs’ and I found that refreshing.”
When Barclays Global Investors was bought after the GFC by BlackRock, Gladigau stayed on as CIO for a year before moving to Macquarie Bank for 14 months where he was in charge of technology services for Macquarie Capital and Infrastructure.
When the role came up to head technology at WSS last October, Gladigau moved to JP Morgan.
“I’m very achievement oriented which is not that I like to set goals and achieve them – but look for some level of value creation, and for firms whose organisational values match my personal values. An organisation needs to value its people not just as a commodity but as a source of intellectual capital for the future.
“Needs to be an organisation that is interested in empowering people, training them nurturing them, treats them with respect in business downturn.” In a former role at Capita Financial Services, Gladigau had worked under CIO Les Coyne who he felt was genuinely supportive of his team, managed rotation programmes so that graduates could experience working in different parts of the business, and when Capita was bought by MLC, worked to ensure his team all had a job to go to, before quietly leaving the company himself.
That selflessness impressed and shaped Gladigau.
