1. E-Trading Technology
This year has seen financial markets continue to move an
increasing percentage of trading volume away from
traditional voice and discretionary trading into electronic
trading avenues across a range of asset classes. Due to
Electronic Trading’s dependence on Technology,
Electronic Trading Technologists have been in high
demand across Banks, Brokerages, Trading Houses
(including HFT/Prop Houses) and also Exchanges and
Software Houses.
A number of banks have multi-year programmes to evolve
their capability within the E-Trading space, using vendor
infrastructure (from the software/hardware vendors) and
integrating them with proprietary systems they are
developing with a blend of OOO and Functional languages,
which they hope will give them an extra competitive edge
in the E-Trading arms race. Other banks that do not have
an existing programme have initiated new strategies, and
we are seeing new E-Trading Platforms being designed
and built, ideally for use across a range of asset classes.
Whilst there was a dip in their activity over the last couple
of years, Trading Houses such as the High Frequency
Trading/Prop Trading Houses, are again looking to grow
and exploit the tricky regulatory landscape that banks are
trying to navigate through (thanks to the likes of MiFiDII).
Due to their smaller size and agility, they are able to
constantly customise, tweak, and tune the performance of
their latency sensitive systems, keeping them ahead of the
competition.
Exchanges and Software Vendors have been working hard
to evolve their proposition to trading businesses and we
have seen a rise in new firms started by ex-senior
management from some of the big name investment
banks and trading houses. They are able to offer
platforms and products to make the trading process more
efficient, to increase their capability to access electronic
markets and to manage their risk effectively.
The common requirements we are finding are across
Open Source Development (with ability to build and
evolve high distributed, real time trading systems) and
Open Source Infrastructure/Trading System Engineers
(focused on performance tuning and automation).

2. Other common searches we have engaged in include
Technical Project/Product Managers & Technical (vendor
specific) Business Analysts.
There is a real shortage of top talent available as many
technologists who in previous years have looked at the
Trading world as an obvious career choice, are having
their heads turned by start-ups, ecommerce and leading
technology firms. As a result, salaries in the E-Trading
space are buoyant and continuing to rise even whilst other
areas of finance/banking are decreasing.
We have no doubt this will continue to be an area of
growth into 2016 and are in a continual process of
mapping out strategies for clients in this highly
competitive space in the market.
Software Development
C#
Over the last three months, attention has fallen on very
well educated, mid-level C# developers with mid-range
experience, ideally coming off the back of a well-
structured graduate scheme. The C# developers that fit
these criteria are currently worth circa £65,000 at the top
end with up to around 4 years of experience. Since so
many clients are looking for this particular profile, there
are plenty of options for candidates at this level in the
market, leading to intense competition and clients having
to act very quickly to protect their chances of bringing
these candidates on-board. This said, there were plenty of
quality candidates within this bracket looking at the
beginning and mid-way through Q4, meaning that clients
were advised to really focus on their employer branding
and almost share responsibility of “selling the business” to
these candidates. Hiring toward the more senior end was
consistent throughout Q4, with the exception of
December. There has also been an increase in the demand
for developers with the capacity to work across both web
and desktop environments, with businesses, especially
those within banking looking to long-term strategies of
migrating systems into the web environment.
Going into Q1 of 2016 the development market is highly
likely to go from strength to strength. Fund Managers will
continue to hire, and start-ups will once again be able to

3. assess their position to hire and join into the fray as well.
Additionally, banking clients will re-start the hiring process
just in time for candidates coming off the back of bonus
season looking to move onto fresh pastures. Competition
will intensify for the best candidates but there will also be
more traffic on the market. HTML and JavaScript will
continue to grow in demand as businesses look to migrate
systems onto the web platforms with many teams already
prototyping and in R&D stages.
Companies are having to, on occasion, outbid each other,
especially since £2000-£3000 can mean a lot more to
candidates at the junior end of the experience level. This
said, there is also fierce competition from start-ups that
are viewed as more “dynamic” by some junior candidates,
especially when candidates are more tech than finance
focused. A good graduate is currently worth up to £35,000
within a software house and even up to £45,000 in a fund
or an investment bank. At the senior end, salaries have
been capping at circa £80,000 for the VP level roles within
investment banking but as usual the funds are paying a lot
more, especially with some Proprietary Trading start-ups
that have a big budget paying up to £120,000 for a pure
developer with no managerial responsibilities.
We’ve found several certain skillsets to be particularly in
demand of late –
Desktop – C# .NET WPF Multi-threading SQL Server seems
to be almost universal at the minute, with multi-threading
being a bonus.
Web – C# ASP.NET MVC HTML5, CSS, JavaScript and
Angular JS now taking over from Knockout. We have also
noted that Reactive Extensions is something that is now
popping up more often as a requirement.
We have also noticed that, as well as required skills,
diversity has become an important part of the hiring
process. We have been given Diversity targets on several
SLAs, and we’ve found it helpful to reiterate diversity
policies at our clients in order to close deals and convince
candidates to take a role.

4. Python
Python developers are paid a lot more by comparison to
C# developers. Someone with 2 years of commercial
experience can command circa £60,000+. Only the
absolute best junior C# Developers are in that range but
most junior Python developers seem to asking for that
amount, meaning that there is clearly a lot of confidence
on their part, dictated by the short supply of quality
python developers in the market space. Any Python
developers that are on the market are not there for long
and are generally very in tune with all relevant
opportunities due to the smaller talent pool. Mainland
Europe is always a good talent pool for Python due to its
more widespread usage in the commercial space.
Development Market
The development market has been much the same as the
last quarter with a large emphasis from our clients on
building web based UI’s for their stakeholders/ client base.
Whether its IB’s building trader tools or funds building out
portals for investors the real theme seems to be UX
friendly UIs built in HTML5 and JavaScript – AngularJS/
ReactJS etc. Again this has been the theme for most of
2015 and it appears as though it will continue to be a
growth area into 2016 as more and more clients look to
adopt this tech now they can see the results of their
competitors.
We’ve also seen others adopt the ethos of having a
centralised cross asset risk/ pricing system, for instance,
BAML Quartz or JPM Athena, but not necessarily utilising
the same technology (Python). We had a spike in demand
for strong C++ and C# risk systems experts as a result of
this, including a demand on the quantitative development
side.
Big Data continues to be in high demand from an
architecture and development perspective. We have seen
a shift in developers who specialised in ‘in-memory’ data
technologies, (such as Coherence or Gemfire) towards Big
Data technologies such as Hadoop, HIVE and Spark.

5. Scala, which is often hired in conjunction with big data is
still in demand with those who have significant,
commercial experience commanding high daily rates.
Core Java has remained predictably steady and is still the
OO language of choice for selected Greenfield projects
and BAU hires within the investment banking arena.
Day rates have remained stable and the market has
slowed as we approach the end of Q4 with many having
already turned their attentions toward budgets and plans
for Q1/ Q2 2016.
Senior Appointments
Over the summer, we saw a change in requirements from
the Banking world, from technical professionals to Agile
focused technical professionals. This requirement change
saw the Banks expanding their horizons and looking for
candidates outside the banking world/finance sector,
however, agile candidates from companies such as Sky,
Google and Microsoft may struggle to fully adapt straight
away in the banks due to the strict regulations, but we
shall see how that develops as the demand increases.
The market is rich with roles such as Regulatory Change
(due to the adoption of MIFID II), Business Change and
Lean Process Improvement; this may be down to Banks
pushing the streamlining across the business. The Change
roles (Regulatory, Business and Process Improvement) at
VP level were in high demand for most of the year,
however, we are starting to see more Junior Project
Manager roles within the Change space come to light, with
businesses now looking to implement this across all levels.
In the last few months we have also seen an increase of
Risk, IT Security, Fraud Prevention and Cyber Resilience
projects within the Finance Sector, we are expecting this
to increase due to government issues and the prevention
of cyber theft. Again, the banks are looking for candidates
from all employment backgrounds.
Q4 has continued the buoyant pattern seen throughout
the year for hires in the Senior Appointment space.

6. Most hires have been heavily focused on the key areas
within regulatory change, business change and risk, with
most banks responding to the increasingly hostile
regulatory environment (MiFID 2) by hiring large amounts
of contractors, as well as moving current contractors and
perm staff away from lower priority projects to bulk out
these programmes. This has resulted in a fierce
competition for top talent, especially in the BA space,
where many of the most highly sought after contractors
are now commanding substantially higher rates than they
were 12 months ago.
As would be expected in this space, many Programme
Manager and Project Manager roles continued to be filled
through existing networks. These more senior positions
often tend to go to market when more niche
technical/business knowledge is required, for example,
trading platform knowledge, regulatory knowledge or
development knowledge.
One trend that has continued throughout the year into Q4
has been the industry wide drive to adopt agile practices
into all areas of the business. As such, we have seen not
only an increase in Agile Coaching positions, but also an
increase in PM/BA requirements where Agile knowledge
would be a key decision making factor. This is true of
business change/front office roles as well as technology
roles.
As we move into the New Year, we are expecting to see
continued hiring within the regulatory space, with most of
the top firms already indicating they will be increasing
team sizes to ensure their compliance. Outside of the
regulatory world, Financial Crime/KYC remains a large
priority, and there will no doubt be hiring within the
Senior Appointment space for these types of programmes,
alongside business change programmes such as
divestment/structural reform as many of the top banks
continue to strive to return to high profitability.

7. Business Analysis
2015 has continued the buoyant pattern seen throughout
the year for hires in the Business Analyst market, with a
slight drop towards Q4, where many clients have lost
budget or, due to strategic changes put hiring on hold
until the New Year, with the focus falling on other hires
across development, support and testing.
Most hires over the year have focused on the key areas
within business change, regulatory change and risk. This
has resulted in a fierce competition where many of the
most highly sought after Business Analysts are now
commanding substantially higher salaries than they were
12 months ago with many going contracting.
One trend that has continued throughout 2015 has been
the industry wide drive to adopt agile practices into all
areas of the business, with many organisations combining
Agile and Waterfall methodologies. This is particularly true
with roles focused around business change/front office
roles as well as technology roles.
For 2016, we are expecting to see continued hiring within
the regulatory space, with most of the top firms already
indicating they will be increasing team sizes to ensure
their compliance, with many banks looking to increase the
amount of permanently employed employees within their
team, as currently they are very contract heavy.
Other than the expected regulatory-based Business
Analysts, many companies are looking to ramp up on
technology projects, therefore we expect in 2016 for
business to be looking for Business Analysts with a strong
technical background to help with both business process
change and technology change with a focus around Digital
and Mobile innovations.
Business Intelligence
With more companies becoming aware of the importance
of Business Intelligence as a strategic advantage 2015 has
seen more focus on Data Warehousing solutions. With the
use of the Microsoft Stack previously focused on SSIS and
SSRS tools we see companies more focusing on the SSAS
side, analysing the data that they hold to create a more

8. focused strategy for the business as a whole, and
optimising the previously redundant data stored.
In the financial sector particularly, there has been more of
a focus on current customer data analysis to attract new
customers, tailor the businesses’ service to each customer
and retain current business. Data Warehouses have
started to become commonplace and with the end user
now having ever changing needs for complex data analysis
and reporting Business Intelligence reporting tools such as
Tableau and Qlikview have been developed for business
reporting purposes to accommodate this new awareness.
In terms of looking at the market from a recruiting
perspective, candidates with more of a focus on SSAS in
their CVs including Data Modelling and Cube Design are
commanding higher salaries and are all keen to work on
the latest versions of SQL Server. Recruitment at this time
of the year is usually difficult with most candidates not
looking to change until potentially the New Year, and in
the financial services sector until bonuses are confirmed.
The focus for data in 2016 is more towards Big Data
solutions including Data Science, with Hadoop and SAS
working together to make big data analytics more
accessible. We also believe we will see more self-service
analytics being accessible to more employees in an
organisation, with companies now looking at the way
people think as a key to hiring, and pushing analytical
thinkers to the front of the line. Analytics will become
more mobile and more technologies will become available
to fill gaps. We believe companies will start to move away
from the usual MS Stack and embrace more flexible stacks
that will include new technologies such as Hadoop
Accelerators, NoSQL data integration and IoT data
Integration.
Production Support
Within the support market, the trend over the year has
been for a more pro-active approach. This has remained
to be case in Q4, and support is dedicated on monitoring
incident themes and therefore be able to pinpoint the
source of a problem, instead of focusing on resolving its
symptoms. Companies are exploring different avenues
towards this goal; most are focusing on hiring more

9. technical support specialists, while some are even
restructuring their support and development teams into a
joint Dev Ops department.
A result of this new focus is that the need for Financial
Product knowledge is becoming less of a priority, with
many believing it is a more trainable part of a role than the
inert pro-active attitude and technical abilities.
This overall trend has meant that the successful
candidates need to have stronger core technology
backgrounds, usually with a large focus on UNIX and Linux
platforms. With these skillsets, ability to use database
tools for SQL and/or Oracle has been highly advantageous,
and the ability to utilise scripts (Bash, Perl, Python) for
automation of tasks even more so. Other sought after
skillsets include monitoring tools such as Geneos and
Nagios, Exchange Connectivity applications and other
niche applications that are dependent within certain
areas.
As demand has grown for more technical support
specialists, the candidate pool has decreased because the
right candidate will stay on the market for a shorter time.
As a direct result of this, candidate confidence has risen
meaning their salary expectations have also increased.
It is hard to put a percentage growth to this figure from a
quarter to quarter perspective due to Q4’s trends. That
said, juniors with some exposure to the above
technologies could be worth up to £40,000, with Analyst
Level moving toward £50,000 - £55,000. Beyond this level,
it very much depends on the particular applications, and
amount of product/business knowledge required.
While Diversity is a hot topic, particularly within the larger
banks and organisations, for smaller software houses that
run leaner teams the focus is on Core Technology.
Infrastructure
2015 has seen an advent of previously overshadowed
aspects of infrastructure, especially within the sub-
category of Business Intelligence.
A particular emphasis has been around the creation of the
‘citizen data scientist’ in order to make use of the leaps in
harnessing data which we have seen over the last two
years. This new focus on providing accessible and

10. transparent insight has been embodied on the Data
Visualization front by Qlik. They have managed to quash
any advances from competitors such as Tableau and its
market leading position within the Banking and Finance
sector was further solidified with the release of Qlikview
12 in November and the proliferation of Qliksense
throughout the year. This has led to an issue of supply and
demand whereby there are less quality Qlikview
developers on the market than there are roles, alluding to
an increase in rates individuals are able to command.
There has been intermittent hiring in this area with little
correlation, however, there have been notable creations
of ‘insight teams’ as well as the position of the Chief Data
Officer, at a number of the Wharf’s key players.
The importance of accessible data had also been
embodied within the SAS market which has seen
consistent growth since the slump earlier this year.
Although a lot of this hiring has been focused around the
retail banking and insurance sectors, the new-found
collaboration between SAS and Hadoop with the creation
of SAS Data Loader for Hadoop should see further growth
as we move through the initial stages of 2016. Skills such
as DI Studio and EG and knowledge of the Risk sectors
have been in high demand, particularly in order to combat
the demands of IFRS9.
In terms of more traditional aspects of infrastructure, the
databasing market has seen further emphasis on the SQL
Server market which was clear in Q1 of 2015. Although
Oracle and Sybase still have a presence the reliable and
pragmatic nature of SQL Server and the accompanying
Microsoft BI stack has seen it streak ahead in terms of
market share. As with the rest of the infrastructure market
there has been a very slight increase in rates, however,
this has been marginal.
In summary, the most exciting area as we move into the
New Year is the continued growth of the BI & Analytics
market, however, it’s essential not to neglect the staples
of the infra-sphere. Databasing, IT Security and system

11. administration will see continuous growth in 2016
particularly as certain clients re-find their feet following
significant high profile changes and obstacles in 2015. We
foresee a very positive 2016.
Testing & QA
With the automation market becoming more established
in the UK, we are seeing a consistent high level of
movement within Automation across the financial
markets. There is an ever growing competitive need for
employers to constantly improve their offering and reward
to automation test analysts/engineers and developers in
the hope to retain the very best talent. In particular, the
permanent market has seen a good level of hiring across
software vendors, banking & financial services companies.
Movement in this area has come for various reasons:
mainly the need to hire, grow, or replace automation staff
on the permanent side when attractive and increasing
contractor day rates are offered to them for the same role
which significantly outweigh the benefits of a traditional
permanent packages and salaries.
We also find the Finance & Banking market has a new
competitor, the telecommunications, media and
online/internet companies. These markets, which have, in
the past, not been so appealing, have taken a shift toward
becoming technically savvy and attractive as a QA/Testing
and Development employer. With the same, if not more
money on the cards for Manual & Automation Test
Analysts in the UK, there becomes a growing fork in the
road as to whether the finance market is the most
lucrative industry to be in- as it was once perceived to be.
More and more employers are looking at near shore
locations more frequently in major cities outside of the
capital as opposed to outside of the UK, which is a more
traditional offshoring model, largely used for cost
reduction purposes. We are seeing a number of clients
relocating QA resources towards Liverpool, Manchester,
Edinburgh and Brighton.
In line of testing tools, we are finding Java tied in with
Selenium is most common within Automation testing.

12. With most employers wishing to build on their
Agile/TDD/BDD environment, this is becoming heavily
vetted in interviews. The candidates with strong
communication skills, multiple object orientated
programming languages and the exposure to other tools
such as Cucumber and SpecFlow are still and probably will
continue to be the most wanted in 2016.
The testing market will continue to thrive into 2016.
Banking and Financial Services will always be an attraction
for candidates outside of this industry. The industry’s
employers will need to keep producing innovative ways to
retain their technologists. With bonuses being on par with
many other non-financial employers/industries now
combined with resources within QA shifted to near shore
locations as described above, they will need to be more
competitive in the UK Capital to retain top testing talent
where the most competition is. London City will always
require high standards in this market for years to come
and employers can often struggle to secure this outside of
the capital.