Investment bank techies feel the crunch

THE CREDIT CRUNCH is purportedly to blame for the massive slowdown in IT staff hiring and job cuts in the world of investment banking recently, as companies scramble to cut costs any way they can.

According to specialist IT recruitment outfit, ReThink Recruitment, IT job openings were down by a massive 18 per cent in Q4 of 2007 compared to the same quarter in 2006, with only 37 per cent of British IT jobs in the financial sector going to investment banks as opposed to 61 per cent the previous year.

ReThink’s managing director, Jon Butterfield, pessimistically noted that the slowdown was ongoing and that he expected similar results from the first quarter of 2008. Adding a good dose of doom to the gloom, Butterfield told the Financial Times that this was “the kind of drop we haven’t seen since 2000, after the dotcom bust”.

But not all banks are tightening their belts when it comes to IT hiring, with retail banks, insurance firms and hedge funds all beefing up their IT sectors, while investment banks let workers go.

According to ReThink, there was even a 36 per cent increase in IT jobs for the financial sector in 2007, mainly to help combat cyber fraud or in order to modernise and upgrade financial institutions to online banking.

So it seems that hacking has its uses after all. Ironically, in these uncertain and crunchy economic times, hackers are actually the ones stimulating the financial IT job market. Better hope they don’t suffer a crunch of their own. µ

L’Inq
Financial Times