Integration headaches continue to create opportunities for technologists

Banks are still actively hiring IT specialists to deal with the complex business of integrating technology systems after the raft of merger and acquisition activity after the financial crisis, but increasingly people are also being drafted in to handle divesting and shutting down of tech functions as banks pull back from business areas and sell off business units.

As has been widely-reported, one of the primary reasons for the collapse of Santander’s purchase of 316 UK branches of RBS was the cost and complications of integrating IT systems, which could take until 2016 to complete, according to consultants Accenture.

RBS is something of a unique case in that its acquisition binge in the build up to the financial crisis has left it with a sprawling network of disparate IT systems. What’s more, its push to offload a number of its businesses has necessitated an ongoing unravelling of these.

However, one of the biggest challenges facing banks currently is the need to simplify their technology platforms, which is creating a continuous flow of new work for IT professionals, suggests Bradley Wood, partner at capital markets consultancy Greyspark Partners.

“In the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, the focus was on integrating IT platforms, but it’s now shifted towards divesting technology functions as more investment banks and capital markets firms look to clean up their balance sheets or pull out of particular business areas entirely,” he says.

Certain investment banks are still hiring integration specialists, notably J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley. Investment banks are in the middle of significant transformation efforts, with technology platforms becoming more integrated and simpler than they were historically. There’s still a need for institutions to build their teams in this area, suggest recruiters.

However, the bulk of recruitment is still focused on retail banking, suggests Chris Potter, IT assurance partner at PwC.

“When a retail bank disposes of a division, they typically make a copy of their environment and sell that copy to an acquirer. This sounds simple, but it’s far from it,” he says. “There are complex data migration requirements to this, and a whole set of skills not readily available on the job market. Banks want data analysts, database engineers, batch processing experts to name just a few roles. Getting it wrong can be very costly for institutions so they need the right people.”

Much of this work within retail banking remains in the (comparatively expensive) contract market, however. Business analysts in a retail bank should expect £400-500 a day, while project management roles typically pay £400-475.