JPMorgan's Chief Information Officer Steps Down

JPMorgan Chase's (JPM) chief information officer is leaving the company.

Guy Chiarello, who joined the nation's biggest bank in November 2007, "has decided to pursue new opportunities outside the firm," Paul Compton, JPMorgan Chase's chief administrative officer, said Tuesday in an internal memo.

JPMorgan Chase has named executive Mike Ashworth interim CIO while it searches for a permanent successor to Chiarello, Compton said. Ashworth is head of global technology infrastructure and a 27-year veteran of JPMorgan.

Chiarello's exit is the latest in a series of executive departures from JPMorgan Chase in the wake of last year's $6.2 billion trading loss. He told the Wall Street Journal, which first reported his departure, that his decision to leave was unrelated to that incident or the year of fallout from it; a JPMorgan spokesman did not immediately respond to a request to comment on the Journal's report.

Chiarello spent the past few months focusing on how JPMorgan uses the flow of information from customer interactions, web searches, social media and other sources that is often referred to as big data. He told the Journal in February, "Big data is really the theme for 2013."

JPMorgan Chief Executive Jamie Dimon in April highlighted the scale of the company's information technology investment. "We have 20,000 programmers, application developers and information technology employees who tirelessly keep our 31 data centers, 56,000 servers, 22,000 databases, 320,000 physical desktops, virtual desktops and laptops and global networks up and running," he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders. "We spend over $8 billion on systems and technology ever year."

Chiarello previously served in a similar post for seven years at Morgan Stanley (MS).