Kicking off the afternoon’s keynotes at Glasgow Tech Week’s Fusion Fest, Rob MacAndrew, head of engineering & architecture for risk technology at JPMorgan Chase, outlined how businesses can navigate exponential technological change while nurturing talent – with Glasgow itself playing something of a main character role in the finance behemoth’s innovation strategy.

It’s an angle that makes sense, given that last year, the firm celebrated its 25th anniversary since setting up shop in Glasgow, going on to become “one of the largest technology employers in Scotland” – a claim given more heft with the opening of what MacAndrew called their “lovely new building… that we just opened last year” – referring to the firm’s incredible 270,000 square foot space on the Clyde (you can’t really miss it if you’ve ever got the train into Glasgow Central).

MacAndrew’s reflections on JPMorgan’s stronger foothold in the city’s tech scene is a familiar one. Glasgow’s ascendancy as an innovation hub comes at an interesting inflection point for the city – where shipbuilding cranes once dominated the Clyde skyline, glass-fronted tech hubs now house teams wrestling with problems of a different scale entirely.

“Moore’s Law is driving up our processing power,” MacAndrew observed, “but the volume of data that that’s producing and the volume of information that needs to be processed is growing.” He added: “The systems we build today must process transactions and risks we couldn’t have imagined when we first planted roots here.”

Staying the course in a time of technological FOMO

One of the central themes of MacAndrew’s talk was balancing long-term vision with adaptability. “You need to carve out time and mental space to focus on the big picture,” he urged. “Set a strategy, your strategy might be three, five years out. Being comfortable that that strategy and reality is not going to be what you do five years time.”

He warned against the trap of over-commitment to failing projects, a pitfall even major firms face. “We heard earlier today about companies sinking money into this technology, we went away and did a whole pile of work… and it didn’t quite work out right,” he said. “The trick is knowing when to pivot. If you make experimentation cheap and fast, failure isn’t catastrophic – it’s just feedback.”

MacAndrew stressed that innovation can’t happen in isolation. “It’s very easy particularly when you’re in like the financial industry and the technology to drop your head down, stuck in a corner and just be focusing on your little problem,” he admitted. “But you need to be talking to loads of people who need to have very open lines of communication with both your internal stakeholders, your customers, but for the community to come through events like this.”

He drew parallels with Scotland’s history of invention. “Look back over Scottish history over the last 200-300 years and the innovation has come out of Scotland. It’s about being able to have those different ideas and those different personalities bounce off each other.”

Upskilling in a way that’s actually meaningful

A major focus of the talk was fostering continuous learning. “This isn’t about sending people on a yearly training course,” MacAndrew said. “It’s about embedding that culture and that curiosity into the culture.”

At JPMorgan’s Glasgow hub, that ethos takes shape through its Ignite programme internal communities where employees explore tech topics beyond their day-to-day roles. “These are  groups where people come together with similar interests and talk through and just openly explore and discuss different areas of interest,” he explained. “What started here is now going global across the technology centres.”

It’s a topic we took a deep-dive on back in 2021 when the programme was celebrating its fifth anniversary since launching at the firm’s Glasgow hub.

MacAndrew highlighted the city’s unique role in JPMorgan’s tech strategy. “There’s something about Glasgow’s spirit – that underdog mentality, even when you’re a global leader,” he said. “We lean into that. It pushes us to ask, how can we be better? Not just good enough.”

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The firm’s investment in the city goes beyond hiring. “We want to be part of the ecosystem – whether through sponsorships, hackathons, or partnering with universities,” he said, noting that Glasgow’s talent pool is a key draw. “When I graduated, I never imagined a career in fintech. Now, we’re showing people the incredible opportunities here.”

Fail fast, but fail smart

In a regulated industry like finance, experimentation carries constraints. “We’re in a highly regulated financial environment where you can’t just pick the latest demo and roll it out and use it to advise clients or manage money or make trades or anything else,” MacAndrew acknowledged.

“But you can take that and in safe environments, maybe against anonymised test data, or maybe against sort of like just in a lab sandbox environment, give that to people to try out.”

These initiatives, he argued, build “muscle memory for innovation.” He cited internal JPMorgan hackathons where employees tackle real-world problems. “The best ideas often come from people’s actual day-to-day problem. You need to give people that experimentation space where they can try out more broadly.”

Usually influence and change at historical, global business institutions like JPMorgan don’t come from local initiatives, but McAndrew’s talk highlighted that by blending global scale with local engagement – in this case, embracing Glasgow’s innovative spirit – businesses can hone in on some universal truths that many are missing out on.