Frank Giaquinto, a senior financial technology major from Fairfield Township, finished second of 75 audit department interns in JPMorgan’s artificial intelligence challenge this summer.
Giaquinto built his AI assistant, called Compliance Guard, inside of JPMorgan’s established LLM Suite used by thousands of employees. Employees can paste in an email draft, and the assistant provides feedback based on company and regulatory policies.
“What I like about fintech is being that tip of the spear and helping modernize the world of finance. And for me, my ideal career field would be in cybersecurity because I've just always had an interest in that,” Giaquinto said. “I think that fintech is a good jack-of-all-trades thing, where I know about finance and also know about technology.”
Giaquinto said a 2025 internship with the Passaic County Prosecutor’s Office helped him stand out upon applying to JPMorgan. In the county role, he helped with cybercrime, intelligence and IT projects. He even received a security clearance. That earned him trust from JPMorgan this summer, where he worked as an internal audit analyst.
“The main area that I worked on was cloud security, and then towards the end some digital asset [blockchain] security. So my job was helping put together the correct packages for the audit,” he said. “I enjoyed it because we got to look at a lot of different things, and I got to learn about different aspects and different lines of business under the global technology at JPMorgan. I got to see what areas interest me and where I can potentially move to in the future.”
Giaquinto shined brightest in the company’s intern AI challenge for the finance, software engineering and audit departments. “Our goal was to create an AI assistant that solves a real-world business problem for the firm,” he explained. “During training, they gave us a rundown on email etiquette and overall cybersecurity, how to protect ourselves and not leak anything out accidentally. JPMorgan has their internal guardrails to prevent that. So what I created goes one step before that. [With] my email assistant, you paste your email into our internal AI, and then with this assistant has a checklist of things that it goes through. It basically screens your email before you ever send it out. Outlook’s going to scan it again, but this is a first-step safety check.”
The checker looks for data confidentiality, requests for off-channel communications, regulatory conduct and sanctioned conduct. Interns were instructed to harness AI for developing their assistants. “I told it, ‘You are playing the role of an email screener. Here is what you need to look for,’ and I listed what I thought was relevant to look for, and then I said, ‘Your job is to return to me, if the email is good, then return with a green check mark.’ It would also provide yellow or red check marks. … Green was good to go, no changes. Yellow was risky and with a couple things to change, and then obviously red was do-not-send and major changes were needed.”
Giaquinto said that if his assistant is widely adopted, then he could imagine it being integrated throughout the company as an Outlook plug-in. But his immediate focus is his last semester of college, as he’s slated to graduate from NJIT’s Martin Tuchman School of Management in December.
After that, “First I want to take some time off and relax from going to school,” he said. “Then I want to work on some personal projects [or] maybe look for a spring internship in a desired field of mine. I do already have a return offer to come back to JPMorgan in summer of 2027 as an employee,” which Giaquinto said involves an 18-month, full-time program. For his career track overall, he's been studying cybersecurity independently. “Ideally it would be within financial crimes and cybersecurity, which is what I'm leaning toward now.”
Meanwhile, “If I had to give advice to a freshman coming in wanting to study fintech, I would tell them to definitely focus on their data analysis skills, whether that be Excel or basic Python code, because I saw that I had a lot of opportunities within this internship. I'm sure it could be applied elsewhere to use data and analytics, whether that be through Python coding, and then just having that background knowledge in Excel made it a lot easier for me to do my work compared to some of my internship colleagues. That's also where I give credit to my [Senior University Lecturer] Olena Rudna for giving me that basis in Excel.”
“I had Frank in two business analytics courses, where he consistently stood at the top of the class. What really sets him apart is his combination of creativity and strong interpersonal skills,” Rudna stated. “He never settled for the obvious solution and often found thoughtful, nontrivial ways to approach problems. He also has a natural ability to bring people together, which made his teams especially effective during group projects.”
“It doesn’t surprise me that Frank earned a JPMorgan internship, or that he went on to finish second out of 75 participants in their hackathon. He is a great student, a talented young professional, and I’m confident this is just the beginning of a very successful career for him.”
