J. P. Morgan: Making Digital Payments Simple, Seamless And Secure

Reetika Grewal, head of commercial digital banking for J.P. Morgan, talks to PYMNTS about the biggest change the banking giant has seen since the start of the pandemic: the digitization of payments. She shares how this led J. P. Morgan to focus on improving and expanding the use of its digital tools, including the acceleration of real-time payments.

The following is an excerpt from What Did You Change?, contributed by Reetika Grewal, head of commercial digital banking for J.P. Morgan.

The pandemic has prompted everyone to be more resourceful, to look at their current processes to drive automation, and to shift their priorities based on what’s truly important. This is especially true for businesses large and small, across industries. As a result, the strongest change and trend we’ve been seeing among mid-sized businesses since March is rooted in the digitization of payments.

This has led to us doing everything we can to further enhance and drive awareness of the great digital tools we have invested in, and to make them accessible to businesses as quickly as possible. One example of this was accelerating the launch of real-time payments, both within our portals and through our APIs. As transactions switched rapidly from checks to electronic methods, we felt it was important to push the development of this new payment rail to help clients manage their businesses. 

We’ve always had great digital tools available to our clients through all of our portal experiences. However, it’s clear to us, now more than ever, that a seamless, secure and especially simple digital experience is critical to the success of businesses. Fortunately, we’ve been able to deliver tools that help with this and make it easier to manage money safely, such as our Fraud Protection Services for mid-sized and small businesses. This collection of tools centralizes and simplifies the features we offer so clients can start using them sooner, and also supports our clients as they look to build out and automate controls to ensure that the payments process is digitally protected.

We’ll continue building upon the infrastructure with new features to help businesses manage payments and fraud and understand their financial health. We’ve become keenly focused on helping firms with automation in the last few months, too. This means looking deeply at their existing processes and tools, like ERPs or accounting software programs, and working closely with them to help design digital solutions that drive automation, reconciliation and a deeper understanding of their business.

Clients have been taking advantage of our invoicing and payments tool, and for those who want to manage their vendors outside of their banking portals, we offer connectivity with ERPs — all because they are simplifying complex processes and allowing businesses to spend more time on their day-to-day operations.