Bank jobs, finance jobs, recruitment in the financial markets, accounting and investment banking. Find jobs, post resumes and browse job market news

In the rush to get a bigger piece of the commodities pie, banks are building up their tech teams to improve trading platforms.

As the credit crunch continues to bite, commodities remains a favourite area for expansion among banks, and many are still playing catch up to the big players, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Deutsche Bank, Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, JPMorgan, Barclays Capital, Fortis, Lehman Brothers, BNP Paribas and Royal Bank of Scotland have been aggressively building their commodities businesses in recent years, and recruiters say there’s a need for cutting edge technology platforms and the developers to build them.

Paul Thoma, managing director of investment banking IT search firm Garthorne Associates, says: “The banks that are more advanced in this area are looking to rebuild and redevelop. They have more mature models and product offerings. Big banks, who are not as strong in commodities, are looking to improve what they have and focus on more strategic areas.”

James Davies, head of trader systems at Trayport – a vendor of commodities over-the-counter software solutions – says the firm has expanded from 40 people two years ago, to 100 now, driven by massive expansion in the area.

“Some of our clients in the commodities space are happily pointing to the empty office space below them and are expecting to fill it – it’s a straight doubling of staff for traders, and it follows on that technical staff will be required to support that.”

One headhunter tells us that Barclays Capital and Citigroup are most aggressively expanding their development teams in the commodities space, and that many people are being poached from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Developers in the area need Java or C# skills, depending on the individual bank, and a good knowledge of third-party vendor systems like Openlink is seen as an advantage.

There’s also a demand for quantitative developers, to create systems that can aid the firm’s desire to grow the business quickly.

Quants can haul in £80k to £150k, and Thoma says bonuses can come in at 100-200% of salary. Meanwhile, a generic front-office developer can expect £60k to £80k, though bonuses can vary wildly between 20% and 100% of salary, depending on the individual, say recruiters.

There’s a greater focus on packages over salaries in this area, reckons Thoma: “The bigger banks are pretty stringent on what they pay, particularly on the IT side; they’re trying to sell bigger packages, but base salaries are very much capped in terms of bandings.”