2010 has seen a marked increase in vacancies across the financial sector, from asset management to investment banking. Thanks to an increase in financial regulation in particular, headcounts are rising in banking operations, compliance and risk as those teams are dealing with much higher workloads.
The increase in roles started back in January, and has continued to pick up throughout the year. While increased regulation has been talked about in the press for some time, it is only now that the regulations are coming into effect and are being translated into increased workloads and more job opportunities.
While smaller investment houses and asset managers remain cautious in their recruitment activity, the larger banks are making a return to big volume recruitment. In this new world of greater transparency and accountability, investment banks are having to declare their trading volumes, and their outstanding exceptions and positions against each other to regulatory bodies like the FSA or FED. At the same time they are also looking to improve their existing risk data flows across securities operations. With the FSA and Federal Reserve monitoring investment banks very closely, and having the power to fine organisations or suspend trading, and with public pressure on banks unlikely to diminish in the coming months, there continues to be a much greater focus on risk reporting than in the past.
What this all means from a human resources point of view is that there is a far greater need for more employees, and we are seeing more demand for experienced operational risk control and reporting analysts. Prior to the downturn, there would usually only be one person responsible for reporting. With more budget being allocated to reporting, it is not uncommon now to see whole teams responsible for reporting on trading volumes and looking at where their organisation’s risk may lie.
Jobseekers are more likely to secure these roles if they have a hybrid of experience, demonstrating a knowledge of operations, management reporting and financial reporting, ideally with a finance and accounting background. Employees with IT skills are in particular demand as this allows the employee not only to do the reporting but also to build a reporting tool.
On the compliance side, it is also leading to far more opportunities in monitoring, trade monitoring and desk-based reviews and control room functions – parts of the business that were revealed to be weak in the past, and therefore are now coming under greater scrutiny by the regulators.
