J.P. Morgan and BlackBerry part ways due to cost cutting

BlackBerry is getting ready for the much-anticipated launch of the BlackBerry Priv sliding keyboard smartphone, the first of the company to run on Google’s Android operating system. While they get ready for that, John Chen keeps worrying about the future of the company’s smartphone division and has said that it would shut down if it didn’t sell at least 5 million smartphone units in the next year, including the Priv. Another blow is delivered to the struggling company by J.P. Morgan, who will no longer give out BlackBerry handsets to its employees.

J.P. Morgan spoke to the Wall Street Journal and detailed that employees of the multinational company will have to buy their own smartphones from here on out, because the company is trying to cut growing costs. The company says that if htey stop handing out BlackBerry phones, or rather phones in general, to their employees for free, they would save up to $10 million each year.

J.P. Morgan started giving out free BlackBerry smartphones to its employees last year in an effort to integrate the company’s ecosystem and the employees access to it. Starting next year, employees of the company will have to buy their own smartphones as the company will no longer be funding this aspect of logistics.

Although the financial giant aims to cut operating costs with the dropping of BlackBerry smartphones within the company, and said it expects the move to bring down costs by 6% each year, there’s something fishy about the entire thing. That’s because when announcing that they would no longer give employees free phones, they also detailed that employees will be able to use any kind of phone to do their business – but how will the company maintain a communications ecosystem if some are on Android, some on iOS and some on BlackBerry? We all know cross-platform compatibility is still a luxury.