How to earn 2k a day in financial services technology

In what's shaping up to a year of cooling recruitment prospects for financial technologists, prime services is standing out as being an active area of hiring - and banks are willing to pay for the right people.

We understand that Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and HSBC are all currently recruiting for IT roles within the prime services and recruiters suggest that these roles can be very lucrative.

"People running a global change programme in prime services on a contract basis can command between 1,500-2,000 a day," says Justin Willis, director of IT in finance recruiters Bright Purple. "Even development roles are paying 750 a day on contract and permanent positions are offering 80-90k base and a total package of 120-130k."

Prime broking is a relatively fertile area of recruitment currently, but prime services is more than this in a lot of banks. It can also include trading operations around equity financing, collateral management, repurchase agreements, and synthetic products like equity swaps and contracts for difference (CFDs).

Providing IT solutions is no easy task - technical skills alone comprise a deep understanding of Java, JBoss AS, Adobe Flex and Sybase database management, among others as well as product knowledge for senior roles, suggests Willis.

However, there are also IT projects around certain elements of prime services, and the majority of positions are around "building out new repo trading systems and rolling out into new locations", says Stephanie Marshall, associate director of permanent technology recruitment at Astbury Marsden.

Perhaps not surprisingly, though, the most lucrative positions are for those technologists leading total overhauls of the prime services IT systems.

"A head of application development working within IT can expect a package of 300k currently," says Willis. "Both banks that are building out a prime services function and those that are among the larger players in this area realise the value of a cutting edge technology platform."