Work at google? The next coveted job could even be in a bank

Working in the bank’s technology department may finally be as cool as getting hired at Google.

The tech talent market is less turbulent than a few years ago, but the big banks say they are still hiring in large volumes. And talent is flocking to the sector – which can offer new hires the chance to file patents and work under researchers drawn from top academic departments. Also the stability of the job and the social prestige that comes with the statement that you work at J. According to Morgan, they are harmless.

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At recruiting events, students line up out the door, according to Christine Tu, a distinguished engineer at Morgan Stanley and director of artificial intelligence and machine learning in the corporation’s wealth management technology division. That didn’t happen a few years ago, she added.

Tu attributes the emerging interest, among other things, to the sector’s success in promoting its artificial intelligence and technology work. Morgan Stanley has talked a lot about their early partnership with OpenAI.

“It’s evident in these long lines. People are talking to us. They’re realizing that there’s more and more room in the financial field that can fit their skill set and their interests,” she said.

The financial sector is tailing the tech giants

While technology companies remain the largest employers of recent tech graduates, the financial services sector is catching up. Cornell University said 22% of its computer science graduates in 2023 went to work in financial services, up from 16% in 2022. At Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, 19% of its 2020-2023 master’s in information systems graduates chose to work in financial services, up from 16% between 2018 and 2021.

Prem Natarajan said he was able to leverage his experience working at USC and Amazon to bring talent to Capital One, where he serves as chief scientist and head of corporate artificial intelligence. According to him, Capital One is recruiting technological talent “as aggressively as we can”, for positions in all layers of artificial intelligence, including experts in artificial neural networks as well as model building, training and fine-tuning.

It’s easier to get that level of talent now than it was two years ago, he said. “We were there in the market and preached the value of all these technologies for the financial sector.”

For tech talent, the market as a whole is more cautious than it has been in recent years. The reason for this lies partly in the economy and partly in over-recruiting during and after the corona epidemic, said Ryan Sutton, an expert in recruitment and technology consulting at Robert Half. The tech jobless rate fell slightly to 2.5 percent in November, the lowest since roughly 2024, according to trade group CompTIA. The national unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.2%.

As far as job applicants are concerned, the gap in the degree of attraction between working at a technology company and working at a bank is narrowing, Sutton noted. The compensation is similar for similar positions in both sectors. But after the shocks of widespread layoffs and the growing sense of instability, tech companies are no longer rolling out the red carpet for their employees with perks like constant flexibility, lavish trips away from the office, and vacations at health and spa resorts.

Meanwhile, the finance sector is entering the field.

The banks court the talents in a variety of ways

Banks are looking to give more and more space to their AI work, investing in dedicated research departments and focusing on improving skills and internal development, with events like the hackathons as ways to court talent. This is how Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and CEO of Evident, which monitors the adoption of artificial intelligence in the financial sector, explains.

J.P. Morgan has succeeded in this, probably more than anyone else, said Musavizada. CEO Jamie Dimon has built one of the strongest tech research departments outside of Silicon Valley, starting with the hiring of stars like renowned Carnegie Mellon researcher Manuela Veloso in 2019.

“A candidate who is an AI talent is looking at the board,” Mosbyzada said. “Are they making the issue a priority? Are they making it very clear that artificial intelligence is going to be the focus?”

Such talent is also looking for tangible proof of the bank’s commitment to technology, such as patents.

In 2023, Capital One and Bank of America joined Toyota and a dozen tech companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and IBM, among the top 15 patenting companies for AI-related services, according to Harrity & Harrity, a patent consultancy.

“A lot of people are gathering outside our doors, interested in doing complex technology work,” said Hari Gopalkrishnan, head of consumer technology, business and wealth management at Bank of America. “If you want to do a PhD in a very specific vertical and do research and development, maybe we’re not the right place. But for a lot of other software development and data analysis tasks, there are a lot of options here, and people are excited to be here.”

Bank of New York Mellon woos talent with regular training events and hackathons, and most recently is poaching an AI supercomputer powered by Nvidia chips, according to Sarthak Pattanaik, head of the bank’s artificial intelligence center.

Pattanaik noted that BNY is hiring for positions in machine learning engineering, data engineering, artificial intelligence and information security. According to him, it is important for him to show talented candidates that they can work on meaningful problems.

“We feel AI has transformative power and that it can be part of every product and service we build as a bank,” he said. “We just needed to create a much broader pool of talent that could execute it.”