Compliance is where IT's at
A blizzard of new regulation is making IT security a compliance issue, and compliance departments are scrambling to fill the new posts.
Nick Prescot, senior consultant technology risk at McGregor Boyall Associates, says it's all down to the fact that banks being more active than reactive these days when it comes to compliance. He has seen director-level IT hires on compliance teams achieving 80k or 90k a year, up 20% or 30% on a year ago.
Louise Clarke, manager technology permanent at Robert Walters, tells us she placed a project manager into a compliance IT team at an investment bank on a base of 100k plus 65k guaranteed bonus - unheard of previously.
She adds that senior project people with non-finance backgrounds are being drawn to fill the current IT compliance void in financial services.
Simon Walker, a director of Hydrogen Group, says business analysts for IT compliance have seen their basic rise from 55k to 65k or 70k a year plus varying bonuses. Contractors' incomes have surged from 500 to 700 a day.
The current compliance gold rush may not last, however. Today's contractors are apparently been taken on for two-year periods - long enough to see the arrival and bedding down of MiFID and Basel II, but that's about it.
