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JPMorgan pulls a key tech move with its payment app: #FailFast

Snacks / Thursday, August 22, 2019

Fetch isn’t going to happen, Gretchen... And neither is “Chase-Pay me.” JPMorgan is shutting down its Chase Pay app next year (small caveat: the online shopping version will survive as an easy checkout option). The simple reason is not enough people were using it — 70% of online merchants accept PayPal, but less than 1% accept Chase Pay.

It's not a tech company... JPMorgan doesn't realize that. It's pouring $11B into tech initiatives, but its bets on payments aren't paying off quite like tech companies' are. Let's go back to 2015, the magical time just after Apple launched Apple Pay. Since then, Apple Pay's been adopted by 43% of iPhone users — JPM hasn't. Google Pay and PayPal's Venmo are beating Mr. Morgan, too.

“Failing fast” is a muscle — and JPMorgan is flexing it… The nation’s most valuable bank recognized that instead of wasting big time and money on an expensive failing project, it’s best to end things. Quickly. And this isn’t JPMorgan’s only fail fast moment:

  • Finn is out: The bank’s emoji-saturated, zero-fee, Millennial-inducing mobile banking app was killed in June.
  • So are Canadian Credit Cards: They weren’t making money, so JPMorgan ended them (and it's even forgiving all the Canadian debt on the cards to fail really fast).

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