JPMorgan Chase Modernizes Payments with Temporal

In the complex world of payment processing, JPMorgan Chase (JPMC) stands as a behemoth, handling over $10 trillion in transactions daily. As one of the largest financial institutions globally, JPMC continuously redefines its technological landscape to meet the challenges of scale, compliance, and innovation.

During Replay 2024, Rajesh Iyer, Executive Director of Software Engineering at JPMC, revealed how the bank leverages Temporal to drive payment modernization and fuel innovation.

The Challenge: Legacy Systems Meet Modern Demands

JPMC’s Consumer and Commercial Banking (CCB) division manages an immense share of the bank’s daily transaction volume. Historically reliant on monolithic systems, the division faced challenges in ensuring durability, reliability, and compliance in payment workflows. Developers bore the brunt of these challenges, tasked with implementing complex patterns like event sourcing, state management, and retry handling.

As JPMC began its journey toward cloud migration and microservices, the need for a unified solution became evident. According to Rajesh, “Developers shouldn’t have to focus on patterns and failure handling; they should focus on delivering business logic.” The search for such a solution led JPMC to Temporal.

Temporal’s Role in Modernization

Temporal Cloud offered JPMC a platform to abstract away the intricacies of workflow management. Durable execution, a core strength of Temporal, ensured that workflows were resilient to outages and failures. Temporal’s capability to integrate seamlessly with both greenfield and legacy (brownfield) applications made it a perfect fit for JPMC’s diverse ecosystem.

One pivotal innovation is JPMC’s adoption of Temporal Nexus, a feature enabling domain-based microservices to interact as a unified “Nexus service.” Nexus standardizes services like fraud checks, funding, and settlement — previously scattered across monolithic systems — into reusable components accessible firm-wide. This shift is a cornerstone of JPMC’s modernization strategy, streamlining operations and boosting scalability.

Open Source as a Strategic Advantage

JPMC’s commitment to open-source technologies played a significant role in the adoption of Temporal. Open-source solutions offered the flexibility to customize workflows to meet stringent requirements around security, authentication, and compliance. Rajesh emphasized, “With open source, we can tinker, customize, and contribute back to the community. That’s something commercial off-the-shelf solutions can’t always offer.”

Enabling Developer Innovation

By offloading the complexity of workflow orchestration to Temporal, JPMC unlocked new opportunities for developer productivity and innovation. Developers can now focus on high-value tasks, such as creating new payment features and enhancing customer experiences. This focus has been instrumental in integrating recent acquisitions, like FROSCH and cxLoyalty, into the Chase app seamlessly.

Temporal’s observability features also proved crucial in meeting regulatory compliance standards. Built-in metrics and audit capabilities ensure that every workflow adheres to data retention and security requirements, a non-negotiable in the banking sector.

The Results: Strategic Patience Meets Rapid Progress

Modernizing a $4 trillion institution doesn’t happen overnight. Rajesh candidly shared that JPMC’s Temporal journey has spanned two years, marked by meticulous evaluations and architecture reviews. Yet, the results are undeniable: durable payment workflows, streamlined cloud migration, and a foundation for future innovation.

Temporal’s ability to bridge the gap between legacy systems and modern applications ensures that JPMC can continue to scale while maintaining the reliability and resiliency that customers demand. As Rajesh put it, “We’re only getting started with Temporal, but it’s already a game-changer.”

Driving Innovation Across the Industry

JPMC’s success story underscores a broader trend: payment modernization is no longer optional. As businesses face increasing pressure to deliver seamless, reliable payment experiences, solutions like Temporal are becoming indispensable. By focusing on durable execution and abstracting complexity, Temporal empowers companies to innovate faster and with greater confidence.

For organizations managing complex workflows, JPMC’s journey offers a clear takeaway: the right tools not only solve immediate challenges but also unlock long-term innovation. Explore how Temporal can help your team build scalable, resilient systems with $1000 in Temporal Cloud credits for a limited time.