JP Morgan has appointed James Reid as a chief information officer (CIO).

Reid will have responsibility for a new division — Employee Experience and Corporate Technology — that will focus on updating and modernising the banks IT systems. He will be the bank’s first black CIO in its history.

Reid started at JP Morgan in May 2019 as head of the corporate technology division's engineering and architecture team after spending 17 years in software engineering roles at Equifax.

The banking giant also named Melissa Goldman as CIO of newly renamed finance, risk, data and controls technology unit.

Goldman will lead a team working technologies for risk, compliance, finance, liquidity, controls and data functions.

Black people are extremely underrepresented in C suite roles in US financial services firms according to research by consultancy McKinsey.

At the entry level of these firms, the proportion of people of colour is in line with their representation in the US population —around 40 per cent.

However, this proportion falls gradually throughout the corporate ladder until, by the C-suite, it has dropped by 75 percent.

JP Morgan’s chief executive Jamie Dimon highlighted a reliance on legacy systems, which he said need to be moved to the cloud, as a weak point of the banking sector in his annual letter to shareholders in April.

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