Money Tracker

JPMorgan Chase & Co., the largest U.S.bank, is also one of the biggest and fastest-growing corporate employers in metro Philadelphia. After adding 2,000 local staff in the last three years, the company employs nearly 9,000 in the region, close behind Merck, Comcast, and Vanguard.

Most JPMorgan Chase staff in the region work in northern Delaware, long a tax and regulatory haven for banks. The bank has designated that area as one of its seven U.S. "strategic technology hubs," where it is expanding operations, even as it closes or trims scattered facilities in other areas and cuts back on staffing levels at its thousands of branch offices.

The bank is poised to expand its local bootprint again this summer as it opens its Delaware Technology Center at a former AstraZeneca "south" office complex on U.S. 202, between Wilmington and Chadds Ford.

The center will employ 2,000 new and relocated "technologists" to analyze spending data from more than 100 million U.S. customers and help the bank's corporate clients better target their own consumers, said Tom Horne, head of customer services and card operations at Chase. "We are just bursting at the seams" in Delaware, he added.

For the tech center, designer Ted Moudis Inc. of New York and general contractor Gilbane Building Co. of Rhode Island are replacing the "very '90s" drug-company offices with a "very open" office plan, with pastel modern furniture, walls removed to let in light, and interactive wallboards and video connections, Horne told me. The idea is to encourage increased collaboration, including what programmers call "agile" software-writing, where engineers argue daily with business managers instead of writing code in isolation.

Comcast and Vanguard are among the other companies that have lately designed their own area tech centers geared to brainy workers in their 20s.

In addition to the new bank tech center, JPMorgan also operates a credit card and consumer lending center, from two glass-walled Wilmington office towers overlooking the city's Frank Furness-designed Amtrak and SEPTA train station; an investment data center in Christiana; a sales office targeting middle-market companies in Center City Philadelphia; small lending and support offices scattered across the region; and more operations housed in former MBNA Corp. buildings at Ogletown, near the University of Delaware, where JPMorgan Chase recruits hundreds of college interns and graduates each year.

As the largest U.S. bank and the largest Visa credit card issuer, JPMorgan Chase has built up massive databases detailing how American consumers spend their cash. The company also processes credit card loans and has invested heavily in digital and mobile spending technologies. And it has invested in European-style chip-reading and wireless phone-reading payment machine systems, in advance of the credit card industry's October 2015 ultimatum ordering merchants to install chip-reading machines or risk having to pay for future customer fraud losses.

All this makes the bank a powerful partner for companies such as Marriott and Chevron, which have lately announced deals for Chase to run their card programs, said James Ray, a managing director at Chase Commerce Solutions in Wilmington. So the bank is both the biggest issuer of Visa cards and the manager of its own network that is, in part, a rival for the larger Visa system.

Is it scary for consumers to know that their spending habits are being tracked and shared by banks and merchants? "We do not sell lists. We do demographics," Ray said.

Without targeting individual consumers, bankers share information with client companies about which customers, given their spending profiles, are most likely to eat out on weekends, buy fast food when they are away from home, or seek special hotel deals at summer resorts, and they deliver discounts to get them to buy more, or switch brands, said Jennifer Roberts, president of strategic alliances for the bank.

"Retailers are struggling to hold on to market share online," Ray said. "We can work with them to target a strategy to hold those consumers," using Chase data analytics to "get more heads in beds and feet in the lobbies."

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@PhillyJoeD