Why the coolest job in tech might actually be in a bank
Summary
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.
Working in a bank’s technology department might finally be as cool as than landing a job at Google.
The market for tech talent is more measured than a few years ago, but big banks say they are still aggressively hiring. And talent is flocking to the sector, which can offer new hires the chance to file patents and work under researchers plucked from top academic departments.
Job stability and the social cachet that comes with saying you work at JPMorgan Chase don’t hurt either.
At recruitment events, students are lining up out the door, according to Christine Tu, a distinguished engineer at Morgan Stanley and the head of artificial intelligence and machine learning in its wealth management technology division. That wasn’t happening a few years ago, she added.
Tu credits the interest in part to the sector’s success promoting its AI and technology work. Morgan Stanley has talked extensively about its early partnership with OpenAI.
“With all those long lines, people are talking to us. I feel like they also understand there’s more and more utilization within the financial area that could match their skill sets and their interests," she said.
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.
Prem Natarajan, said he has been able to leverage his experience working at the University of Southern California and Amazon to bring talent into Capital One, where he serves as chief scientist and head of enterprise AI.
Natarajan said Capital One is hiring tech talent “as aggressively as we can," for roles across the AI stack, including experts in neural networks as well as model building, training and fine-tuning.
It is easier to get that level of talent than it was two years ago, he said. “We have been out there in the market evangelizing the value of all of these technologies for the financial sector."
The market for tech talent overall is more cautious than it has been in the past few years, in part because of the economy and in part because of some over-hiring during and after the pandemic, said Ryan Sutton, technology hiring and consulting expert at Robert Half. The unemployment rate for tech occupations fell slightly to 2.5% in November, around the lowest it has been in 2024, according to the trade group CompTIA. The national unemployment rate rose slightly to 4.2%.
For job candidates, the attraction gap between working at a tech company and working at a bank is shrinking, Sutton said.
Compensation is similar for comparable roles across the two sectors. But, shaken by layoffs and a greater sense of instability, tech companies are no longer rolling out the red carpet for their employees with perks like perpetual flexibility, lavish off-site trips and wellness retreats.
Meanwhile, the finance sector is stepping in.
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, according to Alexandra Mousavizadeh, co-founder and chief executive of Evident, which tracks AI adoption across the finance sector.
Perhaps no one has been more successful at that than JPMorgan, Mousavizadeh said. Chief Executive Jamie Dimon created one of the most robust technology research departments outside of Silicon Valley, starting with the hire in 2019 of well known Carnegie Mellon researcher Manuela Veloso.
“AI talent looks at the leadership," Mousavizadeh said. “Are they making it a priority? Are they making it very clear that AI is going to be a focus?"
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 in the list of the top 15 companies obtaining AI-related utility patents, according to Harrity & Harrity, a patent consulting firm.
“There are plenty of people lining up [at] our doors interested in doing complex technology work," said Hari Gopalkrishnan, head of consumer, business and wealth management technology at Bank of America. “If you want to do a Ph.D. in a very specific vertical topic and do research and development, that may not be us, but for a whole lot of other software development and data analytics tasks, there’s plenty here and people are excited to be here."
Bank of New York Mellon woos talent with regular training events and hackathons and recently deployed an AI supercomputer with Nvidia chips, said Sarthak Pattanaik, head of the bank’s AI hub.
Pattanaik noted BNY is hiring for roles in machine learning engineering, data engineering, generative AI, responsible AI and information security—and is invested in showing talented candidates that they can work on meaningful problems.
“We feel AI has transformational power and can be part of every product and service that we build as a bank," he said. “We just needed to create a much wider set of talent who can execute on this."
Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com
