Five hottest jobs in financial technology in 2010

The good news for IT in finance professionals is that after a prolonged period of contraction, permanent vacancies appear to be on the up again. But which roles or business areas are particularly in demand?

Here's what we've managed to extract from conversations with recruiters in the fintech space.

Front office support

Both the buy-side and the sell-side once again have the freedom to expand their front office support capabilities, which has prompted a lot of movement - and therefore a need for replacement hires - in this sector, according to recruiters.

Nick Finlay, manager, specialist financial markets at Hays Financial Technology, says: "Candidates at both fund managers and hedge funds have largely been sitting tight over the last 18 months, but demand for front office support professionals has picked up of late, which has created a lot of churn in this area."

Paul Elworthy, associate director in the IT in banking and financial services division of Hudson, says these roles have has picked up within i-banks as well: "Budgets have grown again a demand just seems to have jumped recently as a result."

Risk

Regulatory pressure has created an ongoing requirement among financial services firms to improve data quality around risk exposures and this has resulted in a need to invest more heavily in IT infrastructure.

The result is a sustained need for techies in this space, says Adrian Marples, director in the risk practice at Kinsey Allen: "A lot of banks are overhauling their risk management architecture, which means we've seen an uptick in demand for technologists," he says. "However, banks are really looking for risk practitioners who can bridge the gap between the business and IT."

Testing

To developers, the humble tester - or quality assurance professionals, depending on your title preference - might not be considered a particularly glamorous or sophisticated role. However, it's one which a number of banks - including, we understand, Barclays Capital, Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley - are recruiting for.

"The need for the banking sector to have robust, mature testing centres is becoming prevalent once again. Releasing code into a live production environment and expecting the support teams to remedy any issues is no longer acceptable," says Paul Bennie, director of IT in finance headhunters Bennie MacLean. "These are complex roles, and there's not a ready supply of experienced candidates - banks are therefore offering up to 120k for these people."

FX

The race for the best FX e-Commerce platform among investment banks may have been the story of 2009, but it shows no sign of abating this year.

"Banks have continued to re-engineer their electronic trading and e-commerce platforms particularly within the Fixed Income and FX sectors. This has created an over demand for developers with Java or C# skills and experience of front office technologies within this asset class," says Adam Pizzie, manager, IT at Robert Walters.

Commodities

The buzz around commodities technology continues unabated, with the debate currently centring on the potential use of algorithms in this sector.

Hiring for techies, however, remains focused around more conventional IT skills, and has continued to be a fertile area of recruitment in the first quarter of 2010.

"We're seeing a need for both developers and change consultants within the commodities sector," says Oliver Hinchliffe, team leader in the IT division of recruiters Project Partners. "This is for a combination tailoring off-the-shelf products like Openlink to banks' specific requirements, and developing bespoke platforms in-house."