JPMorgan Chase has seen the number of hacking attempts on its systems soar over the last year.
Mary Callahan Erdoes, chief executive of the bank's asset and wealth management division, revealed the scale of the threat during a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
“The fraudsters get smarter, savvier, quicker, more devious, more mischievous,” says Erdoes. “It’s so hard and it’s going to become increasingly harder and that’s why staying one step ahead of it is really the job of each and everyone of us.”
JPMorgan spends around $15 billion a year on technology and employs more than 60,000 technologists, many of which are dedicated to protecting the bank from the hackers.
"You want your money moving around the world in today's environment where AI is taking over and people can crack in? We have 45 billion, billion, cracks into our system that don't make it through, not on an annual basis, on a daily basis.
"There are people trying to hack into JPMorgan Chase 45 billion times a day...the worst part about that number is it's 2x what it was last year."
She continued: "Who's going to invest the money to protect your assets?...we have 62,000 technologists in our company. We have more engineers than Google or Amazon. Why? Because we have to, and we want to, and you want us to. You need us to protect that."
JPMorgan later clarified Erdoes' comments: “Ms Erdoes was referring to observed activity collected from our technology assets, malicious or not. This activity is then processed by our monitoring infrastructure.”
“Examples of activity can include user log ins like employee virtual desktops, and scanning activity, which are often highly automated and not targeted.”