Dan Gallagher’s Blog on IT Careers in Investment Banking

The economics of business is changing. The majority of trading is done electronically with tighter spreads and smaller commissions on each trade. With the acceleration of trading risk mangement has become much more important, as has the need for quality risk solutions. Banks are looking to build cross asset risk management platforms to enable their business lines to expand. This means that they need an integrated data and IT architecture with a heterogeneous set of applications and databases.

As risk becomes more real time the need for SQL developers with an understanding of derivative products becomes even greater. These SQL developers play a key part in ensuring that live market data is quickly captured and consolidated into a single, powerful risk and trade data repository. Investment banks are building in-house applications that can look at proprietary positions, customer positions, trading volumes and offsetting verses aggregating risks.

For SQL developers, whether Sybase or Oracle, this represents a great opportunity to work in a complex yet highly visible project to the front office business.

If you are an SQL developer with an interest in analytics or derivative products and would be interested in working on a risk management project then call me on 0777 153 8973 or 020 7151 5105.