Technology jobs coming after senior ranks shake-up
Bank of America has added yet more firepower to the upper echelons of its IT team with the appointment of George Sherman as CTO for global banking and markets and global commercial banking.
It's not the only firm to have recruited senior technologists and it's safe to say more job opportunities will be created lower down the ranks.
Sherman joins from Morgan Stanley, where he was chief technology officer of the Americas enterprise infrastructure organization. Earlier this year, BofA also named Michael Dubno, former CTO at Goldman, as head of global markets and research technology; John Tumilty as chief operating officer and head of global equity technology from UBS; Kirat Singh, as head of global markets risk systems and Glenn Gribble as head of developer architecture.
Sadly, for Morgan Stanley, the immediate impact of this may be some other senior techie defections: "Usually, new CTOs look to bring in people from their previous job - as these are people they can trust - before looking to build out their team lower down the ranks," says one IT in finance headhunter.
Certainly, this was the case with Dubno - Tumilty, Singh and Gribble are all ex-Goldman alumni.
"The appointment of a new CTO ultimately means an IT shake-up," says Chris Pickles, head of investment banking and global accounts at BT Global Financial Services. "Increasingly senior technologists are taking an integrated view with IT, looking for economies of scale across the whole organisation. This means establishing what is necessary to build in-house to gain a competitive edge and what to outsource."
Ultimately, this means some people could suffer, says Pickles, but in key areas of IT investment jobs will be created.
There have been moves among senior techies in other investment banks this year. Andrew Vaden, formerly divisional CIO and head of application development for institutional securities at Morgan Stanley, has switched to Nomura as managing director and CIO.
UBS named Hishaam Caramanli as co-head of FICC e-Commerce and Jeremy Lehman joined Barclays Capital as head of sales and investment banking division IT, Americas.
Lower down the ranks, banks have also been recruiting IT professionals. Andrew Dudak joined Goldman Sachs as a VP in its client technology solutions unit; UBS named Robert Kissell as executive director in its client trading and execution team, while BarCap unveiled two new IT VPs in Chris Bylott and Ronit Ryba.
