JP Morgan Chase & Co. Company Visit

     Last Tuesday, March 26, 2013, the whole IT-EXPO class had our company tour at JP Morgan Chase & Co. at Bonifacio Global City. Since this is the first time that I’ll be stepping at BGC, I am in awe and amazed at how clean and orderly the place is. Just like Makati, the whole place has a corporate-like ambiance that helps all the employees enjoy the vibe the BGC has. As per this blog post, since we were not allowed to take pictures inside their office, this post will just contain all the information JP Morgan taught or fed to the students.

     First and foremost, an introduction about JP Morgan Chase & Co. J.P. Morgan has a fully integrated franchise in the Philippines, comprising Investment Banking, Equity Sales and Research and Trading operations, Treasury and Securities Services, and the Global Corporate Bank. The firm has a number of legal entities operating in the country, including the Manila branch of the bank, which has a commercial banking license as well as a derivatives license, and a securities company with a seat on the Philippine Stock Exchange.

     JP Morgan Chase & Co. prepared 5 speakers for us De La Salle students. The first speaker gave us a brief introduction about what the company is. Included is his PowerPoint that contains trivias, history, and all the other things that we’ll know about their company. They also included the companies that they serve (e.g. Fortune, Barron’s, Universum, Top 50 organizations for diversity, and Philanthropy). JP Morgan also has their business resource group. This group contains their employees with disabilities. This is a good opportunity for the disabled as they are given support by this team. The company also promotes on caring for the communities. They do this by education, community, development, arts and culture. In lieu of the business resource groups, 2 organizations are within this context. First is the W.I.N, which provides access to tools that enable the successful retention, development, and advancement of women at all levels at JP Morgan. The second one is Pride which promotes the unity of the LGBT community. There is also employee engagement wherein they have health and wellness town halls, and sports fest.

     The second speaker talked about the hiring process of its employees and trainees. They have triple protection of your account, and the accounts within Chase. He also talked about the different job descriptions the company has, Service desk aegis, quality, supervisor, and operating manager.

     The third speaker, Mr. Jet Calub, associate engineer of JP Morgan Chase, talked about the branch infrastructure services. They provide solutions engineering, quality assurance testing, configuration management and automated employment for retail front office business units requiring a focused service based support organization. They have provided service to branches, ATMs, training, and law officers.

The scope of work that JPMC has are the following:

• Team responsibilities
• Infrastructure engineering and application development
• Changes and configuration engineering
• Service delivery and test management
• Asset and vendor management
• Architecture and security
• Project management

     The fourth speaker mainly talked about servers. On how he manages these servers and continue with their services by having continuous processes and by not having disturbance or inconvenience with these servers.

     Lastly, the last speaker is the most fun of them all. He also studied at De La Salle University so he connects easily with the students. His topic was about the network of the company. On how it supports the infrastructure group, and the virtualization which is the technology that allows you to work. He also talked about some of the introduction that we’ll be having at the company tour.

     After all the speakers have said the things they need to say, it's now time for the company tour. Their office is really huge and unlike other companies, they have their food court which houses different restaurants that offer them fast food. Also, one thing that amazed me is that they have a room for their conferencing within other rooms of the company. It is amazing that it is able to feature live conferencing and you can also view them with this wide 3 monitors and speakers. The whole class is so amazed with this. On the side note: when an employee leaves the door open (of any room), the Singapore branch of JP Morgan Chase & Co. will immediately contact their office to tell them that one of the doors inside the office is still open. Funny that their Singapore head office will call them just for that. They really follow a strict policy. Lastly, we have arrived at the penthouse. Even though it's scorching hot outside, we still managed to take pictures in the penthouse. Here are some of it:

     All in all, this experience is worthwhile as we came to know how JP Morgan Chase & Co. manages their resources and allocate time for them. At first, we actually didn’t know that JP Morgan was a bank; I really thought they are an accounting firm, but with this activity, we came to know more about different industries that also focus on the use of IT. We also were thankful for the free drinks machine as we benefited from them. This is the only company that I know that has the free drinks machine. They also advertise that we may take our OJT at their company. We just have to submit our resumes. Even though we were not allowed to take pictures of the company tour, we were able to take one at their penthouse, which has on awesome view of BGC. This company tour is just worthwhile for me as this is my first time stepping at BGC. The opportunity given to us was worthy of experience.

Taken at the penthouse of JP Morgan Chase & Co.