Finding the Secret Ingredient

With my letter, I was examining the trend from a latency performance perspective, and more specifically, the use of high-performance real-time embedded operating systems (OSes) on non-Xeon or Opteron processors. Not all markets have the same latency requirements. What's necessary for low-latency performance in today's cash equities markets would easily be overkill for many of the over-the-counter (OTC) markets that are still using a hybrid human and electronic trading executions.

Trading applications supporting the less-liquid OTC markets can rely on the more abstract developing environments, such as Java. However, those looking to shave off microseconds of performance from their applications will need to look more at how the specific hardware architecture interacts with the application-something that's not being stressed in computer science classes these days.

This is just one of the many complaints I hear from senior financial technologists about the dearth of expertise they're finding among the pool of potential recent computer science graduates. It's no surprise that most IT organizations wind up poaching talent from rival organizations rather than hiring recent fresh faced graduates. It seems that financial technologists are not born in the university, but built by the banks. Things are changing, however. The University College of London (UCL) should be midway in its second class of graduate students working on their Master of Science (MSc) in financial computing.

Yet, with the collapse and consolidation of banking houses, this talent dearth is now a moot point as the industry is being flooded with experienced financial technologist. Only last week the British press announced that the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is planning 3,000 redundancies out of its global 17,000-member workforce with an equal amount possibly laid off in the near future.

What do you see as the hottest skill sets for financial technologists in 2009?

Drop me a line with your thoughts at rob.daly@incisivemedia.com.