Capital One has put a recent emphasis on building its reputation as a tech powerhouse, which has given it a leg up in Wall Street’s race for talent. 

Capital One talks about itself like a tech company and that status is starting to stick.  

In the bank’s Q2 earnings call, chief financial officer Andrew Young highlighted how Captial One has cut down on tech consultants and their related costs: “We brought that down as we’ve been able to use our recruiting brand to bring incredible talent into the organization,” he said.    

To build its reputation, the bank is active in open source, publishes extensive tech-related content, focuses on reducing engineer burnout, hires execs from top tech companies, and even sells its own software product, Slingshot, externally.  

Similarly, Citi said during its own recent earnings call that it’s shifting from third-party consultants to full-time hires as its tech transformation helps it become more efficient, resilient, and secure: It added 7,000 tech-related jobs in Q2. 

The battle for top tech talent has continued to ratchet up as artificial intelligence – specifically GenAI – has become the hottest new focus for Wall Street. Meanwhile, an in-depth report from earlier this year showed that JPMorgan has snapped up more AI talent than 22 other big banks.  

On the topic of artificial intelligence, we’re offering Distilled readers 50% off digital tickets to ScaleUp:AI, our premier event in October, which will feature Goldman Sachs’ CIO and PayPal’s VP of data science, among many other execs.