Wall Street Embraces Crypto, but Not Quickly Enough for Some Employees

Wall Street has reportedly been hiring more people for digital asset teams, though some employees have been switching up jobs as they seek more risk and reward, CNBC wrote.

J.P. Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are among the banks making crypto and blockchain-dedicated groups – in particular, J.P. Morgan has one of the biggest, with over 200 employees working in its Onyx division.

The JPM Coin digital currency has also been used to send payments globally.

According to Umar Farooq, CEO of Onyx by J.P. Morgan, some of the division’s concerns center around compliance and how to protect the bank’s brand – making it often slower-going than the usual crypto startups.

“There aren’t many places where you can roll out a new platform and that platform can go from literally nothing to transacting a billion dollars of trade a day in a few months,” Farooq told CNBC. “That sort of scale can only be possible when you operate at a company like J.P. Morgan Chase. The upside of that scale is way more important than whatever downsides might exist by virtue of more regulations or controls.”

However, a number of employees have been making an exodus from Wall Street digital asset teams, with some of them expressing frustration over the time it takes to get projects moving within the bigger banks and legacy institutions.

CNBC wrote that crypto startups and banks have been seeing a shift in the hunt for top talent, with many looking into those with “less conventional resumes” over those who have MBAs and are the traditionally good candidates.

PYMNTS wrote that J.P. Morgan has invested in TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence company, though there was no information on how much that went for.

See more: JPMorgan Invests in Blockchain Firm TRM

The report says the investment will help the company fund its cryptocurrency compliance and risk management technology.

“Financial institutions, cryptocurrency businesses, regulators and law enforcement agencies worldwide use TRM’s technology to monitor cryptocurrency transactions for suspicious activity and to trace the movement of stolen or other illicitly obtained funds,” the company said in the release.