JPMorgan Chase's new $300M Plano campus bringing firm together in new ways (Photos)

After being in Dallas-Fort Worth for more than 100 years, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM) decided it needed a campus to bring a culture together in North Texas, so they made sure they had a 'Main Street,' a backyard and a BBQ pit in its newly completing $300 million regional hub in Plano's Legacy West.

The financial service firm has already moved roughly 2,000 employees to the new Plano campus, a process that began this fall, as construction begins to wrap up on the massive hub, which sits adjacent to luxury apartments, homes, retail shops and Liberty Mutual Insurance's new regional campus. Show Full Story

By the end of the year, JPMorgan Chase will bring about 4,000 employees in its new four-building, 1 million-square-foot regional campus. In all, the firm plans to move about 6,500 employees into the campus by 2019.

This will bring roughly half of JPMorgan Chase's 12,000 employees in North Texas under one roof — and is part of a larger strategy by the financial services giant to create a fluid culture in the region. At the end of the process, JPMorgan Chase will trim its operations centers from 22 offices to about a dozen sites.

"We want to feel like one company with one culture in the market, and we think it will just feel better," said Steve Hemperly, who is the site leader for JPMorgan Chase's new Plano hub.

The need to create a culture in the new regional campus played out throughout the design, with photos of North Texas and the open workspace floorplan defined by the names of neighborhoods and places throughout Dallas-Fort Worth.

The campus is designed to create a community-type feel for employees, with a full-service Starbucks retail store and an employee-only Chase retail bank. Meanwhile, the bank's consumer-facing retail location at Legacy Drive and Communications Parkway will open on Nov. 17.

The 'heartbeat'

In the middle of the JPMorgan Chase campus lays a newly-built, pedestrian-friendly corridor running in the middle of the four-building campus. The thoroughfare, called 'Main Street,' was created to pull the campus together.

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The JP Morgan Chase campus will have its own Main Street, which will include a food court, Starbucks coffee shop, dining area, wellness center, childcare and conferencing center. The conference center will help the firm host international meetings to North Texas.

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Each floor has different 'neighborhoods,' or working groups that help employees identify their workspaces. The neighborhoods were named after familiar North Texas places.

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The new hub will create a collaborative community, said Steven Hemperly (R), who is the site leader for the Legacy West campus. Hemperly worked closely with Don Perez (L), executive director in real estate, to create the campus.

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Financial giant JP Morgan Chase has some of the company's history and its culture on the walls of its new regional campus in Plano's Legacy West.

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JP Morgan Chase already has 2,000 employees on its campus, which is still partially under construction. In all, the firm expects to employ 6,5oo workers in Legacy West by 2019. Here, two employees, Israr Shavez (seated) and Nayak Soumyajit, collaborate on a project in the new office.

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The financial services company has a variety of huddle rooms, conference rooms and phone rooms for its employees.

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JP Morgan Chase has a clean desk policy as its new Plano regional hub. The employees must lock up papers and trays in lockers before leaving at the end of the day, which helps protect sensitive information.

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JP Morgan Chase wanted to create a collaborative campus with interaction points like this one on its new Legacy West campus.

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The first Chase employees started work at the new campus in September with phased moves continuing through 2018 and 2019.

Jake Dean

JP Morgan Chase has two parking garages with a total of 6,000 parking spaces, as well as surface parking lots, for employees.

Each of JPMorgan Chase's employees at the new Plano campus will sit within a quick walk of the campus' new 'Main Street.' The pedestrian-friendly thoroughfare will serve as the "heartbeat of the whole campus," said Don Perez, executive director in JPMorgan Chase's real estate group.

"This is designed to have a very urban feel with a lot of back-and-forth between the buildings," Perez told the Dallas Business Journal. "Each one of these buildings can hold a couple thousand people and we expect there will be a lot of activity here."

The 'Main Street,' corridor sits adjacent to an eight-story office building holding a conference center that is expected to hold major international meetings. The campus also two, six-story office buildings and a parking garage.

They will come

The new conferencing center was expanded during the planning process of the campus to meet the firm's growing needs for meeting space, with the ability to hold up to 800 people.

This will be the largest conferencing center known of in the United States, giving JPMorgan Chase the ability to bring a lot of its meeting business in the campus and show off its new locale, said Hemperly, who is already working from the Legacy West campus.

"In the past, anytime we had a meeting larger than a few hundred people, we would have to find space outside the firm," Hemperly said. "This is one of the things executives around the market really wanted. We have a lot of business in this market and this will bring in people from all over the world."

Officials with the financial services giant didn't have an estimated rate of use for the new conferencing center, but Hemperly said he believes it would be a popular venue.

"We think since we built it, they will come," he said, adding the Legacy West location was also an attractive environment.

"There were cheaper options for us outside of Legacy West, but we wanted to go to a place with livability, the lifestyle and amenities for our employees," Hemperly said. "This is a vibrant environment for them to work in."

The conferencing center will have a outdoor terrace with a staircase leading from the second floor of the building to an events lawn and retention pond being built in partnership with the city of Plano. The backyard-style lawn will also have an outdoor kitchen, including a BBQ pit, to provide food for company events and meetings.

Dallas-based HKS Inc. is the project architect. Dallas-based KDC is the developer behind the campus, with Beck Group operating as the general contractor of the project.