The coming wave of regulatory-driven recruitment for technologists

Techies in the financial sector who benefited from the raft of work that came from IT projects related to MiFID should rejoice - the possibility of creating 'living wills' for large banks could bolster employment prospects even further.

Firm plans for dealing with so-called systematically important financial institutions (SIFIs) when they encounter potentially apocalyptic Lehman-style trouble are some way off, although G20 leaders have just endorsed a timetable for international co-operation on these overhauls, based on recommendations from the Financial Stability Board (FSB), by the end of 2011.

The prospect of 'living wills', or how to smoothly run down a 'too-big-to-fail' institution when it reaches the point of no return, has been mooted since last year, and a preliminary list of 30 institutions has been drawn up by the FSB.

The result is that these banks have been pre-empting regulatory requirements and hiring technologists to focus the development of recovery and resolution plans, suggests Edward Ekins, managing consultant of the financial services technology division of Twenty Recruitment.

"In hiring terms, this is reminiscent of MiFID but on a much larger scale. Additionally some of the big mergers we have seen since the global financial crisis means that there are huge systems migration and change management projects to be undertaken," he says.

Currently banks are focused on hiring project and programme managers at VP and director level, he suggests, but this will "trickle downwards once the department heads are in place".

P. J. Di Giammarino, founder and CEO of JWG IT, a think-tank that assesses the impact of regulation on capital markets, agrees that banks will hire techies but says most will be reluctant to roll out huge recruitment plans in the immediate future.

"The requirements of the living wills is likely to be hugely data intensive and create a need for change, which will result in demand for the types of skills we saw under MiFID," he says. "But while we have a preliminary view of what's required in the UK, there's still a lot of work to be done at a G20 level and there's no concrete agreement on what's needed globally. While that plays out, the nature and scale of these programmes within SIFIs will shift."

For the time being, though, Ekins remains convinced of increasing demand, and insists that salaries are rising and banks are offering buybacks to retain key staff.

"Anyone with experience of diagnostics, project planning and implementation around Mifid, SOX Basel or exposure to regulations around liquidity management can consider themselves pretty hot property at the moment," he says.