Goldman Sachs poached JPMorgan's head of data engineering for the investment bank

If you're interested in the application of machine learning in investment banks then you may be familiar with Luc Teboul. Admittedly, he wasn't on our list of the top people in machine learning in finance, but this was our omission: Teboul was one of the top people in machine learning at JPMorgan's corporate and investment bank- until he left for Goldman Sachs.

Teboul has just joined Goldman as a managing director in consumer and commercial banking technology, according to his LinkedIn profile. The implication is that he'll be working on technology relating to Marcus, Goldman's consumer lending product.

This is a shift for Teboul, who was head of data engineering technology for the corporate and investment bank at JPM. In July 2018, JPM insiders said that Teboul - who had responsibility for JPM's data strategy, information architecture and the 'data reservoir' - was pretty much running the machine learning effort in the investment bank.

Six months can be a long time though, and JPMorgan made some big machine learning hires last year - adding Manuela Veloso in May and Apoorv Saxena in August. It's possible that Teboul felt a bit crowded out, or that Goldman's offer was just too good to refuse. 

GS is already advertising technology jobs relating to Marcus that boast of its use of 'machine learning and intuitive design' to help customers manage their money; presumably Teboul will be developing these further.

A graduate of Ensiie (École nationale supérieure d'informatique pour l'industrie et l'entreprise), one of France's top computer science schools, this isn't Teboul's first time at Goldman Sachs in New York. He moved there in 2006 after starting his career at SocGen in Paris, but left for JPMorgan in 2014. Now he's back.

A few days ago, Charles Elkan, whom Goldman hired from Amazon in April 2018 to help lead its machine learning and AI strategies, suggested that one of machine learning's biggest users in banking might be to parse contracts and news and to determine how current affairs will impact the hundreds of thousands of contracts banks are signed up to. JPMorgan, meanwhile, has been making some big machine learning hires of its own - it hired Tucker Balch from the Georgia Institute of Technology earlier this month. 

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