New retail banks offer glimmer of hope to redundant techies

With a number of the UK's large retail banks currently toiling, new entrants are looking to steal a march on them. And with this comes a need to develop core technology platforms, which means some new opportunities are on the cards for financial IT workers.

Rik Turner, senior analyst within Datamonitor's financial services technology team, suggests that a number of retail banks with "deep pockets and clean balance sheets" are currently looking to enter the UK market, in a bid to capitalise on the crisis surrounding current incumbents.

Chief among these are Tesco Personal Finance and Vernon Hill, the US entrepreneur behind Commerce Bancorp, he says. One of the key challenges facing these new players is developing a core technology platform.

They'll either do this through buying from a third-party vendor or building from scratch. In the case of Tesco, this is likely to be the former, but they're still going to need to recruit a team to run the software internally.

"It's easier now than it would have been a couple years ago, because there are quite a lot of fairly experienced people from the financial sector floating around thanks to layoffs," says Turner.

There are other players looking to enter the UK, he insists: "They're not coming in and expecting to have 700 branches or anything of that sort. They're looking to a few well-placed, usually downtown branches in big cities."

Chris Potter, partner in the banking technology division at PricewaterhouseCoopers, agrees that there will be new entrants and that those rolling out green-field IT projects could provide hope for the legions of laid off techies.

"There will undoubtedly new job openings," he says. "However, you have to balance this against the large number of people who are losing their jobs within more established organisations. Technologists have to be agile and able to exploit these new opportunities when they arise."