Are quants still required?

- To cristian : you know guy, finance is not the 'natural domain' of quants. It is because of the well-known inability of 'good old financiers' to be aware of risks .. that finance needed quants to do it for them. So please, do go to the basics as you called it ! End of story!!!

To gub : It pained you to see mathematicians leaving things like medical research, then you know what : give the same pay to medical researchers as to quans in the banks, you will see the shift ! If our society decided that finance is more 'money worth' than medical research, etc, then why the hell do you want them to go to med research ??? As you look by far much more smarter than quanst, I do strongly suggest that you turn to med research so we will have the big pleasure to fix all kind of deseases like cancer, AIDS, etc

I hope they use there talents to go into medical research and do something valuable for the world.

It pained me to see mathematicians leaving things like cancer research because they were dazzled by the money.

BC, You're right cristian_con knows nothing.

As always when two exclusive options are proposed the answer may well be in combining both. The future will shine for quantitative friendly business owners. No more walls between Joe the car sales upgraded to become a CDO sales and incentivised as if no risk was remaining on the BS, on one hand - and the geek quant on the other hand, whose job is to deliver a model. The new banker will span across the wall and base his judgment on model that he understands. A lot quant stuff has to be written down but let's do not discount the technological shift that occurred in information technology. Life will be even harder to the king of biz lunches than to Mr Copula.

Guess regulator will hire more quants work for them to put eyes on bank behavior. With the force to expose their OTC trading, banks probably have to share their pricing and modeling system to regulator.

cristian_con - you know nothing:
(1) "Old school banks like the French " - BNP/Soc Gen are the most quant - heavy banks around
(2) "Where leverage matters.........." err - what has been the main problem from the last x years of low interest rates? Leverage on anything wil be tight and expensive for the immediate future.
(3) "Time for the old school financiers to be heard and respected" Modelling rate risk on billion dollar transactions based on a flat rate lasting for 100 years and using 2 data points as a basis for regression. You guys know nothing and such type of bankers have been the real source of risk. "Quants" are just people who have a lot of qunatitative ability and are employed everywhere in a bank. Fact is markets are incredibly sophisitcated, banks enter into deals that will last a few years into the future. How on earth would a bank get by without modelling the future? Vanilla bankers beware. Even if the world will be very vanilla - You were pricing swaps on yor own (albeit using a quant's curve builder) happily last few years, how on earth are you going to manage forwards now counterpaty risk, collateral deafults etc have to be taken aware of in pricing more