Even now, asset management firms are open to recruiting technologists

Traditionally, asset management firms have preferred to buy in much of their technology, rather than build bespoke platforms, but new demands being placed on their systems has meant a new-found desire to bring technology expertise in-house.

For a start there's the trend among asset managers to build their own transaction cost analysis (TCA) technology – or the systems provide data and analysis around trade performance. According to a recent study by Aite Group, asset management firms are increasingly dissatisfied with the services being offered by vendors and brokers and are therefore building their own systems in-house.

“That’s sensible since at the moment the analysis is subjective and it’s possible for brokers to manipulate the input to produce results that favour the execution that they provide. The fact that buy-side firms are prepared to invest money to build tools internally shows how important this issue has become,” said Simmy Grewal, an analyst at Aite Group and author of the report.

But this is a part of a broader trend among asset management firms to build rather than buy technology. More fund houses are focusing on improving their trading, portfolio and accounting systems as well as building out systems to drive down the cost of execution.

This is has been filtering down to recruitment.

"Across the board we're still seeing a lot of development, support and infrastructure roles within our fund management clients," says Nick Finlay, head of investment management at Hays Financial Technology. "While some smaller firms still prefer to buy rather than build, there's a healthy supply of new roles emerging even now."

Much like investment banks, fund management firms are also being required to shore up their technology to deal with the raft of new regulation.

As we've pointed to previously, most fund managers are ill-prepared for the data challenges the new regulation will create. They're under pressure to reduce admin costs, increase scalability and use research more effectively, all of which requires changes to their data management.

"This represents resourcing issues as management needs to assess whether they have sufficient staff to make the changes," Gary Goldberg, head of the hedge fund and prime services practice at financial services technology consultant Capco said.