Is the coolest job in Tech in a Bank?

This was an interesting headline in The Wall Street Journal which made me open my eyes:

Why the Coolest Job in Tech Might Actually Be in a Bank

For tech and AI talent, jobs at financial services companies are more desirable than they have ever been. Banks have been working hard to make it happen.

The article investigates the latest graduate hiring rounds and finds that banks have queues of engineers lined up, trying to get a job with them. A lot of this seems to be down to the rise of AI in finance and tech in general.

While technology companies remain the biggest employers of recent tech graduates, the financial services sector is creeping closer. Cornell University said that 22% of its 2023 computer science graduates went into financial services, up from 16% in 2022. At Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College, 19% of master of information systems management graduates between 2020 and 2023 went into financial services, up from 16% between 2018 and 2021.  

Another interesting nuance is that banks are now competing for the war of talent in tech.

Banks increasingly are looking to publicize their AI work, invest in pure research departments, and focus on upskilling and internal development with events like hackathons as ways to woo talent

The article concludes by quoting Sarthak Pattanaik, head of the AI hub at Bank of New York Mellon. Sarthak believes that “AI has transformational power and can be part of every product and service that we build as a bank. We just needed to create a much wider set of talent who can execute on this.”

This gets interesting as it is almost like The Collective in Star Trek. Run by the Borg, a fearful group of cybernetic organisms, you end up with a human-technology integration. Is this where we are going?

Maybe you fear it, maybe you don’t, but it is clear that technology is being absorbed into every part of our daily lives and, more often than not, our financial lives. This is why banks are hiring and bringing on board hundreds of engineers in their graduation hiring round. And why would those graduates want to work for a bank?

Well, I guess the answer to that dates back to a comment made to me by Bill Wallace, Head of Digital at JPMorgan Chase, when I was writing Doing Digital. I asked Bill why a bright-eyed young tech graduate would want to join a bank. Here’s his answer:

“If you are a new A* engineer, you might gravitate towards a start-up. If you’ve been through that cycle, you often find you do a whole bunch of work and no one actually got to use it, because the start-up failed. Engineers really want to do stuff that their mother, father, siblings and buddies are going to use. That is part of that. You want to make an impact. The other part has been universally consistent in all of my career. When I interview people and ask: why are you interested in changing jobs? The answer is nearly always: I want to come to a place where I can make a difference. I love challenging problems. I'm a problem solver. I hear that all that time. When you are touching thirty-three million people’s lives every day, that’s making a difference. When you are working in a very cool start-up it might be fun. You might have a really good time and yes, you have the potential of changing people’s lives, depending on what the topic is, but you’ve got to have customers to have that impact. That’s one of the values that we bring. In addition, if you work with smart people and in an environment with cloud based technology and the all the latest things like AI and ML, you’ve got to have data. We have that data. Thirty-three million sets of it.”

It’s all about the data, making a difference and connecting with people to make their lives better. It will be interesting to see how the next generation of graduates will make that happen.