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Ever-advancing technology is a must for handling the wealth of functions commercial real estate clients deal with day to day. Partner Insights spoke to Kurt Stuart, commercial term lending managing director for JPMorgan Chase, about how the firm utilizes cutting-edge technology to serve the banking needs of its commercial real estate and multifamily clients.
Commercial Observer: In this time of economic uncertainty, what’s the current state of the multifamily sector?
Kurt Stuart: At the transactional level, most people are doing their best to assess the current environment and what it means to them as a sponsor, equity partner, borrower or lender. Currently, the prevailing theme is around price discovery, given that asset values today, and what they will be in the future, are being driven by interest rate movements over the past nine months. Asset level fundamentals are still quite good.
However, the imbalance between housing supply and demand remains an issue throughout the U.S. And while the market is delivering more multifamily, it’s not enough to satisfy the demands of the market. So, from a macroeconomic standpoint, multifamily still offers compelling reasons to invest. People have been returning to major cities, and have helped lead rents past pre-pandemic highs.
JPMorgan Chase Treasury Services offers a host of tech solutions to help multifamily owner/operators manage their business. Talk about some of the latest innovations JPMorgan Chase offers commercial real estate and multifamily clients.
On the banking side, most people who own, operate, and manage commercial real estate still utilize manual tools to manage their business including payments functionality (i.e., paper checks). The pandemic created an opportunity for a shift in mindset and accelerated the need to become more modern and efficient. The technology we offer creates efficiencies in an operator’s middle and back offices and can help make those teams more productive. Our technology also keeps organizations safer with our fraud protection features and functionality.
Finally, this is still a relationship-oriented business. One of the many advantages we offer our clients are our people, and having a dedicated team that serves the real estate industry exclusively is a very important aspect of what we provide.
What are some other ways your Treasury Services can help multifamily clients?
Our Chase Connect platform offers a fully integrated treasury and payments portal to meet a firm’s cash management needs, and our Cashflow360 technology enables an operator to connect digitally with suppliers to automate invoicing, payments, approvals and reconciliations.
Additionally, the commercial real estate industry is among the largest sectors of the economy by size, but among the least digitized. Our digital commercial real estate management platform, Story by J.P. Morgan, was developed to aid in the pursuit of that digitization.
How do these services make the everyday experience of managing multifamily housing easier for clients?
It’s about two things: efficiency and productivity. Banking has the ability to be more fluid today than ever before. Our Cashflow360 technology can save an operations team hours in manual paper and reconciliations, manage their payments and receivables in a more modern way that maximizes cash flow, and simplify the invoicing framework. Finally, banking today needs to be like operators today — mobile. Our Chase Connect platform allows you to send payments and wires and check balances all from the convenience of a mobile device.
How does feedback from clients help inform your tech innovations?
I love this question, because client experience and being acutely aware of our client needs are at the heart of what we do every day. Our technology products go through a design-led approach where clients help inform the journey, and our rent collection technology is a great example of this. We start with our customers, determining through formal interviews and listening sessions what their needs and pain points might be. Then we think through how we can leverage what we learned to solve those issues. We’ve used that approach in our lending business for years, and now use it to inform how we develop banking and technology tools for that same client base.
Talk about the advantages of consolidating different functions through JPMorgan Chase Treasury Services.
There are a handful of advantages, like having a dedicated person you can call. Since you’re consolidating payables and receivables activities at an administrative level, our digital platform can offer up economies of scale, bringing efficiencies and productivity on the client side. Having a firm that understands cybersecurity the way we do, thinks about those emerging risks, and has the capability to invest in solving those problems is tremendously important.
What advancements can we expect from JPMorgan Chase Treasury Services in 2023?
We’ve been a leading lender in commercial real estate for many years, and we’ve started our journey in offering both banking and technology solutions to clients. As we weave all of this together, having a more impactful and insightful relationship with your bank is on the horizon for our clients, and you can expect us to be at the forefront of it.
Link to Cathy Cunningham article if we want to include: https://commercialobserver.com/2022/10/story-jpmorgan-digital-cre-proptech/
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