Ivette Agosto worked for eight years at a Starbucks inside J.P. Morgan Chase’s New York headquarters. She endeared herself to many regulars, and five months ago was hired as a personal banker at a nearby Chase branch. PHOTO: STEVE REMICH FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
For about eight years, Ivette Agosto arrived each morning before dawn at the Park Avenue headquarters of J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. and entered the skyscraper through the loading dock. She spent more than two hours preparing for the arrival of hundreds of bankers, knowing she played a crucial role in the firm’s operations: Ms. Agosto was J.P. Morgan’s star barista.
Ms. Agosto, 36 years old, knew who wanted coffee black, and who wanted a pumpkin loaf or a triple-tall mocha (a drink not even on the menu) at theStarbucks in the J.P. Morgan lobby. She memorized the names of regulars, many who dubbed her Happy Ivy due to her habit of greeting familiar faces with “Happy Friday!” at the end of the week.
Ms. Agosto’s popularity got noticed, and now she is steering customers toward debit cards instead of decaf.
Since November, Ms. Agosto has been working as a personal banker at the Chase retail branch about 50 yards from the ground-floor Starbucks within the bank’s headquarters. In her new workplace, which she enters through the front door, Ms. Agosto pitches products to customers, helps them get new debit cards and figures out why they were charged certain fees.
“I was pinching myself,” she said recently, although she noted that some of her friends in the Dominican Republic, where she grew up, didn’t fully understand her new role. She says she told them, “Chase, the bank. I’m not chasing people!”
Ms. Agosto was plucked by Barry Sommers, head of Chase’s consumer bank, who was struck by her connection with customers when he arrived each morning around 7:20 a.m. for his daily “red eye”—an espresso shot she mixed with bold and blonde coffee.
“It was really impressive she knew people’s drinks, that’s one thing. But I got a sense from her that this is someone who really cares, and people care about her,” Mr. Sommers said.
Ms. Agosto’s boss at Chase, branch manager Tashi Sarhan, said she has hired people from the hospitality industry as personal bankers at Chase because of the overlap in customer-service skills. She added that product knowledge and presentation to customers can be taught.
Ms. Agosto, who studied toward an associate degree in business administration at Bronx Community College, didn’t aspire to be a banker. She began working for Starbucks in 2003 on the New York University campus and transferred to the J.P. Morgan building in 2006, shortly after the bank’s chief executive,James Dimon, pushed to have one opened on the second floor of the firm’s headquarters.
Ivette Agosto, left, talks with Alison Rafi, a J.P. Morgan Chase employee Ms. Agosto befriended when she was a Starbucks barista.PHOTO: STEVE REMICH FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
When the bank opened a second location in the ground-floor lobby, Ms. Agosto moved there. Both locations are operated by AramarkCorp. J.P. Morgan is the nation’s largest bank by assets, with $2.58 trillion, and has about 241,000 global employees.
Ms. Agosto was born in New York, raised in Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, and later moved back to New York. She lives in midtown Manhattan with her 14-year-old daughter and rides the subway to work each morning.
Several years ago, she applied for an administrative job at J.P. Morgan, but she didn’t get the position. She took classes at a trade school for medical professionals, but that didn’t go anywhere, either. Despite not being a coffee drinker, she liked working at Starbucks, enjoying the interaction with customers, such as when she asked if she could add a bit of sweetener herself rather than having the customer do so.
“When I do it, it adds a little more love to it,” she said.
Ms. Agosto said several regular customers who worked at J.P. Morgan befriended her and encouraged her to pursue other possibilities in the building. Not long after, Mr. Sommers pulled her aside to talk about possibilities. “If an opportunity came up, I’d grasp at the horn,” she says she told him. Several conversations and a few months later, she got a job offer.
Three other Starbucks baristas in the J.P. Morgan building have recently asked Ms. Agosto for tips about getting in with the bank, she says.
Ms. Agosto says she makes about $5,000 more annually than she did in her old job; the average salary for a personal banker at J.P. Morgan ranges from $35,000 to $48,000, according to Glassdoor.com.
She said the real draw, however, is the potential to learn more about the banking business and possibly develop a career. Her uniform hasn’t changed much—some of the clothes she wore beneath her barista’s apron work at her new office, though she has swapped Starbucks green for Chase’s navy color scheme. But she likes the bank attire better.
“I wanted to look the professional part,” she said. “No hair nets.”
Write to Emily Glazer at emily.glazer@wsj.com
