Posted in: Market Watch, On: September 23rd, 2011

Lanre Fisher – Senior Development Consultant

Java

In the last Quarter we witnessed an increase in the number of new permanent job briefs from clients in Cash Equities and Fixed Income.  Within Cash Equities these briefs have been driven by a shift in the trading market, both in volumes, complexity, client expectations, and market fragmentation.
This has resulted in significant re-engineering and banks taking new approaches to some of the technology platforms supporting the different businesses. Broadly speaking there has also been a need to speed up infrastructure as well as get faster feeds from exchanges.

In Fixed Income most of the work we have been doing has been centred on the delivery of Electronic Trading for Rate and Credit products.  Regulation in the US, UK and Europe has and will continue to be a key driver behind this development.  The trading landscape is set to change even more dramatically once the final blueprints of Dodd-Frank, the MiFID review and the European Market Infrastructure Regulation are approved.

In Credit specifically there has been a need to keep up to date with significant regulatory changes which will dynamically change the way CDS are traded. These changes are due to come into effect in 2012.  To this end, we have also seen demand in this space for Java technologist from faster moving markets who have been involved in similar initiatives.

Whilst there are still strong candidates within the Banks, the demand for Java candidates that have done modern (post-Java 5) Java development and have a good handle on the state of the art in third-party components and development, as well as low-level parts of the API like multi-threading, the Java 5 Concurrency system, and IO/NIO is intensifying.  Consequently, many of our clients are relenting on the100% profile match in favour of candidates they feel have high potential in core Java programming and problem solving ability.  Current market depressions are putting a lot of pressure on everyone,  but this is the perfect time for someone who is canny and skilled technically at what they do to be a crucial differentiator for a company. It’s because of this that the Java market is still strong.

In the contract market some of our clients have slowed down recruitment with hiring freezes in particular areas: Risk – Counterparty Exposure Management, FX – Flow Client Services.  They have also reduced their recruitment, mainly within: Prime Services – Cash Equities and OTC Client Clearing however areas such as Client  on Boarding and Account Maintenance appear to be actively recruiting.

In addition, we have seen a recent trend of contract developers becoming available or unsure if renewals/extensions will be proposed from the banks they are engaged with.

An overview of some of the work done in the contract space is as follow:

Front end: GWT, Flex
and Swing experience and skills have been recently sought to work on GUI applications/projects.

We are recruiting on behalf of a FX Front Office project involving both Greenfield and development/enhancement of existing application working on their UI’s.

A team of core server side Java Developers are require for a project within Prime Brokerage – Equities.

Front Office – Fixed Income – eTrading project – requiring 2 Java Devs to work initially on the Emerging markets desk.

C#

Permanent C# has seen a significant boost in all areas, with a high focus surrounding FX, Fixed Income, Commodities and Equity Derivatives. Management have been keen on brining in both senior candidates and junior candidates and the quarter has seen a real influx of candidates being placed without any industry experience, opening up the market to all talented individuals.

Spread betting and gaming remain two highly demanded industries and “high frequency” and “low latency” platforms being high on every banks agenda’s. Technology wise, there has been a continued demand for WPF developers with a high percentage of new platforms having WPF focused UI’s built. Silverlight seems to be making further inroads into the market, with projects with significantly high budgets, taking the choice to utilise this influential new feature. Watch this space for a wider adoption of Silverlight.

In the C# perm market as a whole, there has been little demand for serverside developers, with the majority of new projects seeming to use C# for their GUI’s whilst retaining a Java server side. Whether this trend continues, we shall see!