BEST OUTCOME
Designing JP Morgan’s Innovation Engine for Scalable, Safe Transformation
A strategic blueprint that helps large banks innovate with fintech speed while remaining compliant and resilient.
DEMONSTRATED CAPABILITY
System-Level Perception Design
🎓 Graduate-level Systems Thinking
Designed and evaluated an interactive 3D reconstruction system by balancing neural rendering fidelity, geometric consistency, and hardware constraints to support scalable AR/VR experiences.
Analyzed and compared alternative reconstruction approaches to select methods that balance visual quality, computational efficiency, and interactivity under constrained resources.
Compared alternative technical approaches by analyzing trade-offs in accuracy, robustness, and resource constraints to inform system-level design decisions.
Compared alternative technical approaches by analyzing trade-offs in accuracy, robustness, and resource constraints to inform system-level design decisions.
What This Project Achieves
This project examines why innovation inside large banks often stalls despite massive technology budgets, using JPMorgan as a case study. Through organizational diagnosis and benchmarking with global leaders, the team identified structural barriers that slow progress and developed a dual-model “Innovation Loop” combining a Venture Studio for fast pilots with a Platformization Layer that scales successful solutions. The result is a practical strategy showing how complex financial institutions can modernize from within while staying secure and compliant.
How This Was Built — Key Highlights
This project followed a structured consulting approach to understand why innovation slows in large financial institutions and to design a model that enables faster, safer experimentation. The work combined problem diagnosis, industry benchmarking, financial assessment, and solution design to formulate a strategy tailored to JPMorgan’s scale and regulatory context.
Analyzed JP Morgan’s organizational structure and identified pain points contributing to fragmented innovation efforts and slow delivery cycles.
Benchmarked global leaders such as DBS, ING, and major technology firms to understand how high-performing organizations accelerate experimentation.
Designed a dual-model “Innovation Loop” combining a Venture Studio for rapid prototyping with a Platformization Layer for scaling and reusing successful solutions.
Developed financial estimates to assess feasibility, cost recovery, and value creation over a multi-year horizon.
Proposed governance structures and decision checkpoints to ensure safe deployment, compliance, and alignment with enterprise priorities.
Challenges
This project faced several challenges related to understanding why innovation inside a large, regulated financial institution progresses more slowly than in fintechs or technology firms. These barriers revealed how organizational structure and scale can significantly affect a bank’s ability to innovate.
JPMorgan’s vast size and multi-layered approval processes made it difficult to achieve alignment and move new ideas through the organization efficiently.
Innovation efforts were fragmented across many teams, making it hard to build shared capabilities or scale solutions across business units.
It was challenging to quantify the financial impact of innovation initiatives in a way that balanced ambition with regulatory constraints and operational risk.
Insights
Through research and structured analysis, this project surfaced several insights about how large financial institutions can innovate effectively despite regulatory and organizational constraints. These findings highlight design principles that help incumbents move at a pace closer to fintechs.
Found that organizational structure—more than talent or technology—was the primary barrier slowing innovation inside large banks.
Identified that combining a rapid-testing Venture Studio with a shared Platformization Layer creates a repeatable pathway from experimentation to enterprise-scale adoption.
Learned that incorporating governance checkpoints and financial feasibility assessments early in the process helps ensure innovation efforts remain aligned with compliance, risk controls, and long-term value creation.
Project Gallery
Academic Team Feedback
Feedback from the Project Lead—an Assistant Professor and scholar in Corporate Global Strategies with a Ph.D. in Strategy from UCLA—emphasized the strength and sophistication of this project’s analytical approach. He noted that Jun Ting’s financial modeling and governance design demonstrated a high level of strategic reasoning, with clear justification for each assumption and scenario. Her structured analysis of innovation barriers and organizational design choices reflected a solid understanding of how large firms evaluate complex transformation decisions. The Academic Coordinator likewise highlighted her discipline, careful validation of results, and consistent production of high-quality analytical work. Overall, the academic team recognized this project as a rigorous, well-executed contribution to applied corporate strategy.
Project Reflection
This project gave me firsthand experience in connecting strategic analysis with financial modeling, helping me understand how structured reasoning turns complex innovation issues into actionable recommendations. It also showed me how large organizations design and evaluate new ideas, deepening my appreciation for the balance between creativity, discipline, and feasibility in real consulting work.