Risk tech recruitment is still pretty hot, if no longer steaming

In the interests of pointing to some sectors where recruitment is still active - if not amazingly buoyant - technologists working in risk and regulatory projects have reason to feel both secure, and confident that more opportunities will appear next year.

Earlier in 2011, banks were starting to recruit technologists to work on both risk and regulatory projects as the scale of the work required became apparent, but this was broadly on a contract basis.

Now, with these technology projects developing in size and complexity, many banks are realising that more resources will be required and are open to the idea of permanent recruits.

"On the retail banking side, there are a number of risk transformation projects underway, which is providing a lot of opportunities, but investment banks are recruiting project managers and architects for risk and regulation projects simply because they have no choice," says Paul Bennie, director of IT in finance headhunters Bennie MacLean. "There's a lot of money being thrown at updating legacy risk systems and preparing for the regulatory overhaul."

A lot of money indeed; banks are likely to spend $74bn in risk management infrastructure technology by 2015, according to research by IDC Insights. What's more, next year risk will account for 15% of all IT spend in the sector, it says. Not surprisingly, the key drivers for this investment are a need to be in compliance with the raft of incoming regulation and a desire to improve corporate governance.

While overall IT spend is expected to slide next year within the banking sector, "the risk technology market is large, and still growing at a good clip," said Michaeal Versace, global risk research director at IDC.

Risk and regulatory tech roles are still being created, but not surprisingly banks are not hiring hammer over fist.

"There are ongoing risk projects and therefore a steady supply of new roles emerging," says Andrew Keene, director at IT in finance recruiters Thomson Keene. "Next year, however, we're expecting an uptick in regulatory related positions."

Part of the reason why recruitment isn't as active as it could be is, of course, largely down to the current market conditions as well as the time of year.

However, Bennie points out that people are being switched across internally from front office tech projects, which is helping the risk and regulation work move forward for now. Soon, however, this supply of people will be exhausted and he expects banks to look externally for new hires.