The current financial turmoil has taken a particular harsh toll on investment banks. We have seen American icons like Lehman Brothers go under and a host of others investment banks like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are morphing into retail banks. Banks like Citibank, Credit Suisse, JP Morgan Chase, HSBC are retail banks with a major present in investment banking.

In spite of the current turmoil, Investment Banks and Retail Banks offer wonderful opportunities for software developers. These organizations are fast to adapt emerging technologies and are constantly moving on the bleeding edge of information technology.

To understand opportunities in these organizations, let look at how they are structured. Most of these organizations will have the following functions,

• Front Office
• Middle Office
• Back Office

Front office is a typical front office function in an investment bank. This function generally focuses on activities like Investment Banking, Investment Management, Corporate Finance, Wealth Management, Merchant Banking, Research and Investment Strategy consulting. These divisions do have fantastic opportunities for financial programmers and financial engineers. Passion for numbers and quantitative algorithms are key for success for IT folks focused on front office activities. Positions in front office involve a lot of client (pension funds, mutual funds, individual investors, insurance companies, corporations) and higher management interaction. Excellent communication skills add to the success of candidates in front office positions. Following are some examples of IT front office opportunities -

Example – Trading Research Analyst/ Developer – posted by Barclays Global Investors (US) on a job board -
BGI is a top-three holder in every security resulting in the need to be extremely careful around how it enters and exits investments so as not to move the market. BGI’s answer to this problem is its unique Global Investment Analytics team.
Barclays Global Investors (BGI) is America’s largest money manager, providing structured investment strategies such as indexing, risk-controlled active products, and exchange traded funds to investors worldwide. For 35 years, BGI has been at the forefront of developing innovative investment ideas, applying science and technology to the investment process. Headquartered in San Francisco and winning first place in the SF Business Times’ ”Best Places to Work in the Bay Area 2008” Awards (Large Companies category), the Barclays PLC subsidiary employs over 3,700 people globally and manages approximately $2 trillion in assets.

As one of the largest asset managers, BGI is a top-three holder in every security resulting in the need to be extremely careful around how it enters and exits investments so as not to move the market or erode its alpha signals. BGI’s answer to this problem is its unique Global Investment Analytics team and its implementation of electronic trading strategies.
We use a highly customized version of a third party vendor product called FlexTrader to implement trading signals and strategies for the equity and currency trading teams. This is a high profile group where we are in a position to directly impact the performance of our funds by providing tools for traders to make intelligent decisions on trade timing and strategy. Working market hours and sitting on the trading floor, Investment Analytics members are very close to the excitement of the markets.
We are seeking a new member to join the real-time analytics team to not only help us support and enhance our electronic trading application, but also to continue to develop innovative tools for our traders. We are looking to expand across additional asset classes as well as expanding the depth of our analytics, to implement automatic trading algorithms using real time statistics on trading signals. The job requires a strong technical background as well as a basic understanding of the equity

Primary Responsibilities
• Initially the focus will be on the support and maintenance of our electronic trading platform. This involves supporting our equity and currency trading applications here in the US and Canada, as well as working with our global partners in the UK and Japan to learn about the specific nuances of their markets. This involves a lot of direct interaction with the traders and brokers, to be the front line support for any production issues as well as dealing with ad-hoc requests.
• After becoming more familiar with the environment, the time will be split up between support and development. The development may involve our expansion to different asset classes, such as futures and commodities or more extensive development of the existing equity and currency applications, such as expansion to emerging and developing markets.
• Build tools to minimize support issues. By proactively identifying potential issues, help us minimize the amount of time required to support the existing systems. Be able to think of creative solutions to automate as many issues as possible. The success of this task will help the entire team devote most of our time to development.
• Work with the short horizon trading team to develop automated trading algorithms. Be directly involved in the implementation and analysis of the algorithms and work with the electronic trading team to continue to improve the performance of existing algorithms.
• Work with the trading analytics team to help build tools for monitoring post trade and intraday trade performance.

Qualifications
• BS in Computer Science, Information Systems, Mathematics or a related field
• Experience working in a front office team supporting traders a production environment
• 5+ years C++/C/Java business application programming in a Unix environment
• Experience developing financial trading applications, especially FlexTrader
• Excellent analytical and problem resolution skills coupled with a strong attention to detail
• Good knowledge of Perl, UNIX scripting and SQL
• Must be able to perform queries in a Sybase server
• Must be able to understand Java and VB source code
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work effectively and adapt quickly in a rapidly changing, team-based environment.

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Middle Office activities encompass Risk Management, monitoring and compliance. The current crisis in the financial industry puts extra emphasis on the function of risk management in an investment / retail banks. Risk management includes the banks ‘operational risk’ as well as ‘market risk’ and ‘credit risk’. These functions address the overall operational risk on the organization, maximum risk on investments, especially leveraged investments using exotic financial instruments as well as the credit risk exposure of the organization. Implementation of risk management products like BARRA, Riskmetrics, Algorithms provide exciting opportunities to IT candidates, both as functional resources as well as technical implementation resources. Quantitative programmers will find exciting engagements in building of implementing complex and sophisticated risk models like VaR (Value At Risk). Non-quantitative financial programmers will be able to be part of the risk monitoring and reporting engagements. Following are some examples of IT middle office opportunities -

Example Management Reporting Business Analyst – posted by BNP Paribas on a job board.
The Finance Project Office North America Region (FPO NAR) ensures that appropriate solutions are put in place for the Finance and Tax organization to meet their business objectives. The team acts as the bridge for the Finance and Tax department to the various other departments within the BNP Paribas group, mainly the business, PMO and technology organizations in Montreal, New York, New Jersey, London and Paris. The team works on a wide range of projects arising from business and regulatory changes, strategic initiatives and reengineering existing applications. The team also provides first-line user support through training, research and responding to general queries.

The Business Analyst will support the non-IT aspects of the system implementations and upgrades and application enhancements for the management reporting accounting systems and the associated application suite. Specifically, the Business Analyst will be responsible for evaluating, testing and coordinating the implementations, upgrades and enhancements of management reporting applications.

This position reports to the head of the Finance Project Office North America in New Jersey.

Responsibilities:

• Quality Assurance
• Test system and operational functions during all development phases
• Test bug fixes and system enhancements
• Support production team during user acceptance testing and post implementation

Business Analysis
• Develop business requirements and functional specification for technology initiatives
• Perform gap analysis (existing systems and process to proposed systems and processes)
• Participate in solution design – recommend system and process improvements Serve as a functional expert on assigned applications and business processes
• Develop training and user support materials
• Conduct formal and ad-hoc training on new or enhanced system functions and business processes
• Provide first-line support to the finance group and liaise with counterparts for questions and issue resolution
• Develop ad-hoc reports and queries based on user requirements or research requirements

Project management
• Develop and maintain project plans
• Develop and manage testing strategy, plans and schedules
• Estimates time and effort to complete tasks
• Facilitate communications between team members, business units, IT and PMO organizations
• Provide project status on timely basis to management and co-workers

Skills
• Experience as a business analyst during development, implementation and support of IT systems
• Extensive knowledge of general ledger, management reporting and sub ledger functions in the financial services / banking industry
• Knowledge of accounting business processes including financial and management reporting, month-end closing, regulatory reporting, entity consolidations and multi-currency processing
• Knowledge of banking products and back office and middle office systems and processes Expertise in developing standard and ad-hoc reports (using Excel and/or Business Objects)
• Expert Microsoft Excel and Microsoft Word skills Excellent communication skills in English (spoken and written)
• Experience in project management and system testing

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The Back Office function in an investment /retail bank basically involves operations and information technology. Back office is the mother load of opportunities for IT professionals. The opportunities for IT include software development for quantitative financial programmers as well as non-quantitative financial programmers, database administrators, technical support, trader support, testing and quality assurance professionals, financial business analysts, project managers and data warehousing. Following are some examples of IT back-office opportunities -

Example from a random job board: BUSINESS ANALYST, OPERATIONS FINANCE AND RISK TECHNOLOGY

Leading global investment bank is seeking an business analyst for Operations Finance & Risk Technology.
• The successful candidate will have a primary focus on upgrading all the back-office technology platforms in cooperate with users’ requirements. They will be working closely with business, gathering requirements and determining the best possible solution for the current finance operations and risk technology.
• The bank keeps its focus on the ASIA investment because that is still where the growth is even in the current financial climate – a great place to get your foot in and secure a role in this whirling turmoil.
• Currently they are in the phase to consolidate their middle and back-office technology making sure everything is updated, risk managed and run smoothly.
• The ideal candidate will have solid business analysis background with some technical skills ideally in .net, C#, JAVA, Access, MS SQL Server, VBA, etc.
• He or she has finance experience within banking, with a strong concept of Risk and Bank Processes.

Pankaj RaoRane
for www.financialprogrammers.com
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