Why the coolest job in tech might be at a bank

The market for tech talent is more measured than a few years ago, but big banks say they are still recruiting aggressively. And talent is flowing into the sector, which can offer new recruits the opportunity to file patents and work under researchers from top university departments.

The job stability and social cachet that comes with saying you work at JPMorgan Chase doesn’t hurt either.

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

You attribute this interest in part to the industry’s success in promoting its work in AI and technology. Morgan Stanley has spoken at length about its first partnership with OpenAI.

“With all these long lines, people are talking to us. I feel like they also understand that there are more and more uses in the financial space that might match their skills and interests,” she said.

While technology companies remain the largest employers of young technology graduates, the financial services sector is gradually closing in. Cornell University said 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’s degree graduates in systems management information between 2020 and 2023 has been oriented towards financial services, on the rise. by 16% between 2018 and 2021.

Prem Natarajan said he was able to leverage his experience working at the University of Southern California and Amazon to attract talent to Capital One, where he is chief scientist and head of enterprise AI .

Natarajan said Capital One is recruiting tech talent “as aggressively as possible,” for positions across the AI ​​stack, including experts in neural networks as well as model building, training and tuning.

It’s easier to acquire this level of talent than it was two years ago, he said. “We went to market to evangelize the value of all these technologies for the financial sector. »

The market for tech talent is more cautious overall than it has been in recent years, partly because of the economy and partly because of some overhiring during and after the pandemic, Ryan said Sutton, recruitment and technology consulting expert at Robert Demi. The unemployment rate in technology occupations fell slightly to 2.5% in November, around the lowest level reached in 2024, according to the CompTIA trade group. The national unemployment rate increased slightly to 4.2%.

For job candidates, the attraction gap between working at a tech company and working at a bank is narrowing, Sutton said.

Compensation is similar for comparable roles in both sectors. But, shaken by layoffs and a heightened sense of instability, tech companies are no longer rolling out the red carpet for their employees by offering perks like perpetual flexibility, lavish off-site trips and wellness retreats .

Meanwhile, the financial sector intervenes.

Banks are increasingly looking to publicize their work on AI, invest in pure research departments and focus on upskilling and internal development with events like hackathons as ways to attract talents, according to Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and CEO of Evident, which tracks AI. adoption across the financial sector.

Perhaps no one has done this better than JPMorgan, Mousavizadeh said. Chief executive Jamie Dimon has built one of the strongest technology research departments outside of Silicon Valley, starting with the 2019 hiring of renowned Carnegie Mellon researcher Manuela Veloso.

“AI talent looks at leadership,” Mousavizadeh said. “Are they making it a priority? Are they making it very clear that AI will be a priority?”

Talent also looks for tangible evidence of the bank’s commitment to technology, such as patents.

In 2023, Capital One and Bank of America joined Toyota and a dozen technology companies, including Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet and IBM, in the list of top 15 companies granted AI-related utility patents, according to Harrity & Harrity, a patent consultancy firm. .

“We have a lot of people lining up (at) our doors who are interested in doing complex technology work,” said Hari Gopalkrishnan, head of consumer, business and wealth management technology at Bank of America. in a very specific vertical topic and doing research and development, this may not be our case, but for many other software development and data analysis tasks, there are many here and people are delighted to be here.

Bank of New York Mellon attracts talent with regular training and hackathons and recently deployed an AI supercomputer with Nvidia chips, said Sarthak Pattanaik, head of the bank’s AI practice.

Pattanaik noted that BNY is recruiting for positions in machine learning engineering, data engineering, generative AI, responsible AI and information security, and that it is committed to showing talented candidates that they can work on meaningful problems.

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

Write to Isabelle Bousquette at [email protected]