The rising salaries of data professionals in banking
By now, most investment banks will have formulated their 2012 IT budgets and generally commentators are expecting them to be down on last year. Obviously, more stringent spending priorities will have to be set, and innovation could suffer. However, there's one area where recruitment looks set to continue – data.
The concept of Big Data – or how to manage, simplify and utilise increasingly unwieldy datasets – is going to be an ongoing headache for most firms this year.
Larry Tabb, founder and CEO of TABB Group, believes data is going to be "all encompassing" for financial services firms this year.
"From financial, risk and compliance perspectives, firms are investing in data infrastructures. Beyond the need to better understand internal positions, risk and profitability, banks will increasingly need to provide data to industry utilities and regulators," he says.
At the Bloomberg tech summit in December, big data was highlighted as an area that would require ongoing investment this year (possibly at the expense of front office innovation) and people working in this area are going to be more high profile.
"Chief Data Officer is a fast rising new job title for a reason - as firms are keen to use analytics to take advantage of big data," Irfan Khan, SVP and CTO at SAP Sybase said during a session at the summit.
It’s not just at the top of the career ladder where banks are looking to hire, however. Headhunters suggest that a number of banks – Deutsche Bank, J.P. Morgan, Nomura, and UBS - are all currently recruiting for business analysts for data programmes or data architects for relatively large scale projects.
Predictably, with demand taking off and the supply of suitable candidates relatively limited, there's been something of a bidding war for those with the relevant expertise.
"A lot of the banks are playing off against one another when it comes to recruiting data analysts and data architects," says Paul Bennie, director of IT in finance headhunters Bennie Maclean. "Director level hires now pay around £150k base, but the salary escalation has been most pronounced at VP level, where salaries have moved from around £80k to £100-120k."
