J.P. Morgan to Open New Office and Payments Innovation Lab in Greece

J.P. Morgan plans to open both a new local head office and a new Payments Innovation Lab within that office in Athens, Greece.

The new office will support the growth of the company’s businesses in the country and will be the new location for its current Athens-based employees in J.P. Morgan’s Corporate & Investment Bank and Asset & Wealth Management businesses, J.P. Morgan said Friday (Nov. 11) in a press release.

The new Payments Innovation Lab that will share that office will provide research and development to J.P. Morgan’s payments business globally. To start, it will focus on solutions around distributed ledger technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and payments systems-related cryptography.

To form this payments R&D team, the company plans to hire 50 local employees, including payments product and engineering specialists, per the release.

“We want to stay at the apex of payments innovation, and our new location in Athens will be a key nerve center for our cutting-edge payments innovation work,” J.P. Morgan Payments Global Head Takis Georgakapoulos said in the release. “The firm has a track record of establishing successful tech centers that benefit from the renowned technology and engineering skills of people locally, and this exciting expansion brings that strategy to Greece in the payments space.”

The firm is in active discussions about securing real estate for the new office, and recruitment for the Payments Innovation Lab will begin immediately, according to the press release.

In related news, JPMorgan Chase plans to launch a new platform to connect founders with venture capital.

The platform will be called Capital Connect, and the bank told Reuters that it would focus on serving startups from their early stages. The goal is to try and capitalize on the way venture capital-backed companies have been ballooning in size — so banks have been trying to build relationships early.

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