Mark-up coming for market data professionals?

Banks' need for market-data savvy technologists looks set to increase.

Two recent analysts' reports predict a huge increase in data in years to come. The first, from TowerGroup, suggests a volume increase of 900% by 2010. The other, from Datamonitor, says spending by the European and US buy-side on front-office market data infrastructure will hit US$484m by 2009, while sell-side businesses will spend US$1.9bn in the same period.

The driving force behind this growth is regulation on both sides of the Atlantic. The US Regulation National Market System (Reg NMS) and EU's Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) both come into force this autumn.

The effects may be making themselves felt already. "In the last two or three weeks I've had an influx of jobs within teams specifically dealing with market data," says Babatunde Ojo, who looks after the permanent development desk at Astbury Marsden.

Ojo says demand is for anything from mid-level to team leader; C# and Perl professionals with four or five years' experience creating data feeds can command salaries of between 65k and 70k. "The demand will continue as long as the market remains buoyant," he says.

However, other recruiters say sub-prime jitters are making companies hold back on hiring. "Sometimes it takes a while for this sort of development to feed through to IT departments," says Stephen Feline, Kaizen Partnership's Java development recruitment specialist. "But I'm sure the effect will be felt when the markets settle down."