Generous severance deals to keep rogue techies sweet

We're a little late on this, but according to something on FT Alphaville last week, investment banks are either a) reluctant to fire IT staff or b) offering them cushy pay-out deals to prevent them spilling the beans over trading strategies or sensitive deal information they may have seen during the course of their work.

"I just told them what I had on them, and let them know I kept copies of it all - particularly the dodgy stuff," said one IT worker.

Techies with access to such "dodgy stuff" are apparently being offered up to six months full pay, as well as rent, accommodation, school fees and even the services of recruitment agencies.

Whether this is really particularly unusual is open to question - as we've reported in the past six month severance deals are pretty much the norm.

Nevertheless, before techies get any ideas, Chris Potter, partner in the banking technology division at PricewaterhouseCoopers, suggests it's not as easy as all that.

"If you look at systems administrators, for instance, they have wide-ranging privileges," he says. "However, increasingly banks put ever more stringent controls in place - IT workers have to request access to files, this is logged and somebody would then independently review that access. It's not as though you can just take the data with you and not be traced."

Banks also don't take too kindly to people trying to call their bluff.

"There have been a number of cases where people have had access to cryptographic codes and have sought to blackmail banks," says Potter. "But the fact that they go to court shows that banks aren't just responding to this and paying up."

On an unrelated, but slightly similar note, both Goldman and UBS have shown their willingness to go after allegedly rogue tech people. Goldman is proving the most willing, however.