JPMorgan’s new top 28-year-old is in product management

Forbes Magazine’s annual 30 under 30 list is out, and the bulk of the finance section is devoted to fintech entrepreneurs. There are a few people from big financial institutions, however, and one of those is JPMorgan VP Zoia Kozakov.

Kozakov is product head for digital wallets at the bank, and has been there since 2022. Her remit at JPMorgan also covers tokenization, and cloud migration. Prior to joining, she spent two years at Citi, and a year at blockchain social network startup Yup. 

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JPMorgan’s consumer product team has been growing in prominence and outshining contemporaries. At Goldman Sachs, where the Marcus and Apple Card projects are being wound down and ‘Platform Solutions’ head Stephanie Cohen has left, product manager roles are allegedly much less flashy.

“With the downfall of Platform Solutions at Goldman, there’s no real product roles,” one Goldmanite told us. Instead, it has “people given the product manager title who are just project managers.”

While the Goldman name carries a lot of weight in traditional banking jobs, the same may not be true of product jobs. The employee said they received an offer from another company in finance… at a seniority below their current level at Goldman.

Of course, networking and having a ‘brand’ is also key to getting on the list. Kozakov has her own non-profit, and a popular podcast outside of her JPMorgan duties, which likely played a big factor in addition to her product gig.

Goldman Sachs had its own 30 under 30 nominee this year: Nina Meyers, a growth equity investor for the bank’s One Million Black Women fund, which Goldman has deployed over $2bn into.

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