After a quarter of a century working for two large multinational banks, Sameer Jain was craving a big change and a taste of entrepreneurship.
He made a leap in 2019 to become a cofounder and chief technology officer at USREM, a startup seeking to create a commercial real estate trading platform. But Jain made the switch mere months before the COVID pandemic would upend his new employer’s business model.
That led him to join Japan-based brokerage Nomura as chief information officer of its wholesale business, which includes sales, trading, research, and international wealth management. Jain said he liked that the company was more focused on trading than the traditional banks—Barclays and UBS—where he worked previously. He was also interested in gaining experience at a Japanese company.
“I was brought in to modernize the technology,” says Jain.
One big project he led as CIO was moving more of the company’s operations to the cloud, primarily working with Amazon’s AWS, but also using Azure for Microsoft 365. Today, new IT architecture is built for the cloud, but can also run on-premises, giving Nomura more flexibility in how it spends money for its IT operations.
Jain also spent over 18 months designing and re-architecting a software platform that helps support new clients. Onboarding new customers at Nomura is complex because of the rigorous due diligence requirements for the financial sector, which involves ongoing reviews by the operations, compliance, and credit risk management teams.
The new software workflow sits horizontally across all the various teams at Nomura, so everyone gets access to the same relevant information at once. It results in a faster onboarding process for Nomura, and clients save time too, as they aren’t approached by a succession of Nomura teams to provide the same documentation.
Initially, Nomura had explored buying an out-of-the-box solution from an outside vendor for the platform, but it later determined the regulatory compliance and client needs were too complex. Regulation is a particularly thorny issue for financial institutions like Nomura, evolving frequently which means the technology Nomura uses or develops must be tweaked with any new reporting requirements.
But even after Jain’s experience of building that new workflow, his own thinking on buying versus building has evolved over the past half-decade. Historically, large financial institutions like Nomura tend to strongly prefer to “build” by creating their own customizable in-house software for complex financial products. As software as a service platforms have become more sophisticated, some IT leaders in the financial industry are rethinking their approach.
“I think more and more, the buy solutions are better than they’ve been in the past,” says Jain.
As for generative artificial intelligence, Jain says there’s some hype in the marketplace, but technology creates the potential for substantial gains in productivity. He’s particularly encouraged by AI copilots, especially those that are already embedded in existing tools from vendors like Microsoft. After setting up AI governance principles and risk control guardrails, Nomura has let some employees access AI copilots, but it is closely monitoring productivity metrics before rolling out such tools to the entire company.
Jain also prefers small language models, algorithms that are trained on much smaller datasets, which he asserts are cheaper than large language models and offer more precision. “We’ve got some stuff in the lab that we’re exploring to see if that hypothesis holds,” says Jain.
When asked which external AI vendors Nomura will explore working with, Jain says he’s casting a wide net, arguing the firm cannot get too attached to any large vendor. Nomura is also taking a close look at using open-source AI and tools from early-stage startups.
“We should be designing a solution so we can swap out the underlying technology,” says Jain.
John Kell
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NEWS PACKETS
CIOs are cashing in on the AI boom. CIO compensation grew nearly 7.5%, on average, among large enterprises and 9% among midsize companies over the past year, the Wall Street Journal reports. It was the biggest gain among all IT job categories. Citing salary data from consulting firm Janco Associates, the Jouranl says CIO and CTO compensation is up more than 20% since 2019, with increases to base pay and, more often, equity packages. The higher pay packages are attributed to growing spending by employers on AI, as well as the higher profile tech leaders have as they take on the responsibility to implement AI strategy.
The banking CIO with a tech budget bigger than most companies. TechCrunch recently published a profile of JPMorgan Chase CIO Lori Beer in which she shared that one important aspect of her role is understanding the interconnectedness of all the different parts of her $17 billion annual budget. “You can’t really start talking about AI if you’re not in the cloud, if you’re not modernizing your data, if you’re not doing all the foundational stuff,” said Beer. She also shared her thoughts on JPMorgan’s hybrid cloud strategy, as well as new technologies like generative AI, tech’s role in tracking trillions of dollars that move each day, and working with startups to tap into their innovations.
Investors pour billions more into AI startups. U.S. AI startups scored $27.1 billion in funding from April to June, accounting for nearly half of all U.S. startup investment in that period, the New York Times reports. The numbers show that AI startups continue to attract huge rounds of funding in what serves as a counterpoint to the broader downturn faced by startups due to higher interest rates. But even as AI promises efficiencies, investors should be wary of costs. An analysis of 125 AI startups found the companies spent an average of 22% of their expenses on computing costs over a three-month period, more than double the 10% spent by non-AI software firms.
ADOPTION CURVE
China leads on generative AI. China is ahead of all other nations in adopting generative AI, according to a survey of 1,600 decision-makers in industries worldwide conducted by analytics software firm SAS and Coleman Parkes Research. Eighty-three percent of China-based organizations are using generative AI in some form today, far above the 54% global average and easily besting the United Kingdom (70%), the United States (65%), and Australia (63%).
But the usage figures combine those that have fully implemented generative AI enterprise-wide, and those still in test mode. When splitting those figures, the U.S. is far ahead of China (24% versus 19%), as well as the world average of just 11%, in using the technology expansively.
JOBS RADAR
Hiring:
- Greystone, a commercial real estate finance company, is seeking a chief information technology officer based in New York City. Posted salary range: $300K-$400K/year.
- Credit Karma, a personal finance brand owned by Intuit, is seeking a CTO based in Oakland. Posted salary range: $375K-$470K/year.
- Lume, a personal care products manufacturer, is seeking a head of technology based in New York City. Posted salary range: $250K-$270K/year.
Hired:
- Prime Therapeutics announced the hiring of Dinesh Kandanchatha as CIO, to help shape and execute the pharmaceutical company’s IT strategy. Kandanchatha was most recently managing partner for Emids’ HealthTech business.
- Northrim BanCorp hired Nathan Reed as CIO of Alaska-based community bank Northrim Bank. Reed has more than 20 years of experience in the banking industry, most recently serving as SVP and chief data officer at Oregon-based Umpqua Bank.
- Intrado Life & Safety appointed Liz Nguyen as CTO, where she will be responsible for technology innovations for the company’s emergency call support services. Prior to joining Intrado, Nguyen was CTO of insurance software provider Vertafore.
- Guitar Center has appointed Adolfo Rodriguez as chief technology and information officer, reporting to CEO Gabe Dalporto. Rodriguez most recently served as SVP of technology transformation at Advance Auto Parts.
- Serko has named Simon Young as CTO, after he served in that role on an acting basis since April. Young joined the New Zealand-based corporate travel technology firm in 2023 as VP of engineering and previously held executive roles at Trade Me and Halter.
- RedHunt Labs appointed Kunal Aggarwal as CTO to help steer the cybersecurity firm’s software product development. Aggarwal was previously CTO at London-based HR screening platform startup Neotas.
- Aspirion hired Doug Hebenthal as CTO, effective immediately, to spearhead the health care revenue management company’s tech strategy and oversee software development, infrastructure, and IT.
