Witad Awards 2021: Engineer/programmer of the year—Jane Xue, JP Morgan

Some people shy away from failure, and as a result, they don’t take chances. Others aren’t afraid to challenge themselves. 

After earning her master’s degree in computer engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, even with a strong base built on mathematics, artificial intelligence (AI), and pattern recognition, Jane Xue found the job market difficult. “I couldn’t find a job in AI—can you imagine? It’s such a hot topic right now, but when I was graduating, there wasn’t a single job that I could find in that area,” she says. So it was that the world of finance came calling, and she joined Bank of America in 2008.

That first year was tough because, as she says, she didn’t know anything about evaluating stocks and bonds, but she landed on the trading support desk and was a quick learner. Xue, who was born in China and received a bachelor’s degree in automatic control from the University of Science and Technology of China, learned a lot, but after six years—and shifting to the credit stress desk, which moved at a slower pace—she knew she needed a change.

Again, there are those who avoid failure, and once they’re comfortable, they stay put. That’s not Xue’s ethos.

“I told myself, ‘If I don’t fail that much, that means I didn’t try hard enough.’ So I got to the point where I wanted to try something different,” she says. “I feel that for myself, I need to go for it. I know it’s easier said than done, especially since I come from Asia—when I was young, I was always told that you have to be humble and, for a girl, you should be quiet and not show off your personality, but that’s not my true personality.”

In 2014, she landed at JP Morgan, where today she’s the global head of due diligence and portfolio construction technology for the bank’s wealth management division.

“I need to work at a place where I can learn from my peers. Otherwise, I’ll just stay there and rot,” she says. “So if I challenge myself enough, that means sometimes I will fail. And I test myself: In the last year, how many times did I fail? If I didn’t fail one single time, that means I didn’t try hard enough.”

It’s through trial and error that Xue and her colleagues have developed some truly innovative technologies.

For example, the team, working side-by-side with their colleagues on the business side, architected and implemented the Portfolio Management Toolkit (PMT), a cloud-based visualization solution that serves as a one-stop-shop for portfolio managers to get data and highly complex risk and exposure modeling calculations. Built from the ground up, today, the platform handles over $300 billion in assets under management. “The biggest impact to the portfolio manager is they don’t have to go to 10 different apps to do their analysis—it’s one single place where everything is linked together,” she says.

The team also designed and developed the Scalable Scenario Management framework, which is based on a unique concept of theme modeling to enable users to manage customized scenarios and simulate the holistic impact of theme changes to related portfolio groups. Built from scratch—“If you ask any developer, they like to do things from scratch. We treat it as our baby,” Xue says—it uses natural language processing to visually see the relationship between related models and what happens to the group if you make a change to a single model.

“As an engineer, we like troubleshooting, fixing things, and getting things done,” Xue says. “Any time we can finish a milestone that has a material impact on the business, that’s the part I’m really proud of. And I’m really proud to work with a group that has all of these innovative ideas and who fight with me to get them done.”

Diversity is also something that Xue says is “personal” to her, and she’s used her clout at JP Morgan to champion projects and groups designed to improve diversity at the firm. She’s co-head of Asset and Wealth Management (AWM) Technology’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee, where she’s responsible for setting the global strategy and driving the bank’s diversity agenda, including recruitment, mentoring, sponsorship, and pipeline/promotion review. This has resulted in a 20% increase in diversity personnel growth for AWM Tech in one year. She also founded the Maternity Buddy program in AWM Technology, which provides “Real Talk” discussions that are open for mothers, as well as managers of all stripes.

“We’re in a diverse world; we need diverse representatives,” Xue says. “That’s how we unleash the full power of our combined intelligence, and that power will create innovation.”