This financial services consultancy is looking to grow its IT headcount by 25%

Pressure to shake-up technology because of a raft of new regulatory reporting requirements has forced many investment banks to re-direct IT budgets towards these mandatory projects.

In some cases, as we've mentioned previously, banks have started to recruit technologists in-house. However, some are turning to specialist consultancies which are in turn seeing a healthy new pipeline of new work.

One such firm to feel the benefit is risk management and trading consultancy Excelian. It says that it's been working on a number of Dodd-Frank implementation projects with bulge bracket banks in the UK in recent months.

It has plans to recruit 50 technologists in London this year, and eventually take its headcount to from around 215 globally to 300.

In a healthy recruitment market, this wouldn't be particularly unusual. However, with most investment banks' tech recruitment plans currently stuttering, the firm has received a high degree of interest from IT professionals looking to switch across to consulting, suggests James Race, senior internal recruiter at Excelian.

"This summer we've seen a lot of interest in our roles from people working in investment banks, keen to broaden their experience base and working in a specialist consultancy," he says. "We'd expect them to be able to adapt their technical skills and experience working in-house in corporate environment to offering objective opinions and solutions to clients."

Excelian also specialises in Murex consulting and implementation and is therefore looking for candidates with experience of the platform. For other IT roles, it wants to see knowledge and skills around Unix, Java, J2EE, SQL, Oracle Coherence and Grid or high performance computing.