Game Changer

The Digital Banking Executive Securing Your Money With Blockchain

Amber Baldet is convincing JPMorgan Chase and other institutions that change is good.

3717-gamechanger-baldet — Illustration: Sam Kerr

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By Matthew Leising

August 28, 2017 at 4:00 PM UTC

Corrected

August 28, 2017 at 8:29 PM UTC

This article is for subscribers only.

This article is part of the September 4, 2017 issue of businessweek.

In 2014, when it became clear that advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence were reshaping finance, executives at JPMorgan Chase & Co. pulled together their best engineers and told them, “Figure this out.” Among them was Amber Baldet, then a 31-year-old vice president for technology. “I started in machine learning, but I kept putting my hand up to say, ‘I know about blockchain,’ ” she says.

Blockchain—the novel combination of cryptography and distributed computing that gave life to bitcoin in 2009—holds great promise for industries such as banking that process immense amounts of data. Baldet, now a JPMorgan executive herself, helped organize the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance (EEA), a group of businesses experimenting with ethereum, a more powerful blockchain than the one that supports bitcoin. The alliance, which also includes Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp., among others, is developing Quorum, a modified version of ethereum with enhanced protections for client privacy.