So, this is where you want to work at J.P. Morgan in 2018

If you're the sort of person who likes to work for a big investment bank, then you're the sort of person who should like to work for J.P. Morgan. In the bank's 2017 annual report, issued today, Daniel Pinto, CEO of the corporate and investment bank (CIB) notes that J.P. Morgan's CIB is the biggest of the lot: its revenues are $6bn larger than any other bank in the world. Nowhere else quite compares.

Predictably, a bank this gargantuan is always hiring. However, J.P. Morgan is more focused on recruiting in some areas than others. Both Pinto and CEO Jamie Dimon confirm one area where hiring will especially strong: technology.

J.P. Morgan currently employs 50,000 technologists across the bank. This year, it will be spending $10.8bn on technology, up from $9.5bn last year. A full $5bn of that spend will go on new tech investments. Goldman Sachs, by comparison, employs "just" 9,000 engineers/tech staff and in 2017 it's combined technology and communications budget was $897m.

The implication is that J.P. Morgan is spending $216k on tech for each person employed in the area, while Goldman is spending $100k.

J.P. Morgan's lavishness might be one reason why Pinto says the old divisions between the front, middle and back office no longer apply. "Our technologists and our product people work side by side, in the same rooms and at the same tables. They’re fully assimilated," he writes in the report. The old divide, "is no more."

Within J.P. Morgan's enormous tech team, one area looks both particularly interesting and particularly susceptible to growth: "digital." Right now, the bank has only 2,500 people in its digital technology team, compared to 31,000 in engineering. As we noted last week, "digital transformation" professionals who help permeate technology across banks' processes are particularly in demand in 2018. Accordingly, J.P. Morgan is currently advertising over 1,000 job vacancies containing digital as a keyword.

If you want to be a part of J.P. Morgan's gigantic tech apparatus, you don't need to get in as a graduate. You don't even need to develop your career in financial services. Pinto notes that 30% of J.P. Morgan's senior technology hires this year came from outside the banking industry, but that they're, "working on finding solutions to some of the most complex issues in the field." In future, he says technology will only become more important as, "artificial intelligence, robotics, machine learning, distributed ledgers and big data will all shape our future."

And if you don't want to work in tech? There's always Asia, where the bank sees "plenty of opportunities" to increase its market share, or even fixed income, where Dimon says there are, "opportunities to gain share in various products and in certain regions where we have low share." The most recent Coalition report suggests he might be talking about EM macro, municipal finance and credit globally, plus fixed income in Asia.

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