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Technology jobs in the financial services industry | IT Careers

IT careers & jobs in Finance | India

For software professionals who are also interested in specialising in a specific sector to distinguish themselves from the generalists, the finance industry offers some good options.

Jignesh Maheshwari, a veteran in the intersecting domains of finance and technology, helps us gain more clarity on the various IT career options in finance, the growth path, starting salaries and responsibilities.


IT careers in financial services sector | India

by Jignesh Maheshwari

IT jobs in Finance India - JigneshWe all know how IT has dramatically changed the Indian job industry and created millions of jobs for software and hardware engineers. However there’s more to IT than just software and hardware. Professionals from other domains can also build their career here.

Finance is one of growing fields in IT for the past few years. It will be in demand for many more years to come, as most of the banks or financial giants are migrating to automated processes.

They are ready to make huge investments in the state-of-the-art technologies. Software (IT) companies in India have a good pipe-line of Banking and Financial Services Industry (BFSI) related projects. This has pushed up the demand for maintaining and growing a skilled work force.

Companies generally recruit people with 3+ years of experience for roles at the entry level. However there is no strict criteria of experience or education to get into these roles.
 

List of IT roles and opportunities in the Finance Sector

 

Tester

Qualifications required: Typically BE, BCA, MBA (Finance), PG diploma holders with few years of relevant experience are need for finance application testing roles.

Generally BPO/KPO/ IT organizations have vacancies for quality analyst (QA), testing engineer, business analyst roles where an engineer is required to do manual testing / automated testing of various financial applications processes.

As an example, for a payment application this would involve testing the end-to-end payment flow from payment generation to disbursement to the right account. It would include all required validations like ensuring if the payment script has all required details about ‘from’ and ‘to’ account numbers, payment disbursement, holiday validation, minimum required balance and cross-country compliance requirements among many others.

Likewise for trading applications, the test engineer will have to see whether the trade has been generated with all the required information like broker details, security details, quantity, settlement instructions, margin, trade booking date, clearing house or exchange details and how it is settled on T+1 or T+2 days depend upon regions.

Salary offered at entry level is typically 2.5 L to 4 Lakh Rupees per annum in India and grows with the years of experience.
 

Financial Application Developer

Qualifications required: Typically BE (IT), MCA, PG diploma holders with few years of relevant experience are invited for this role.

For an financial application developer/programmer role, the right candidate would have a good command over one or more of the popular programming languages (Java, .NET, C++) or a UI framework. One need not to be a master or a hardcore techie for this role, but programming knowledge, OOP (object oriented programming) concepts, framework / database awareness is definitely a must.

The typical job of a developer is to go through the functional documents and prepares Entiry-Relationship (E-R) diagrams, Use Cases, Classes for various processes, preparing technical document which describes relation among various entities of front-end and back-end processes.

A few organizations have separate teams of Business Analysts (BA) to interact with clients and gather the requirement. Often the team of developers handle this task as well and take the help from BA to crack only the complex business processes. Developers and analysts work hand-in-hand in the initial phase to complete the requirement analysis cycle.

Developers are also involved in Unit Testing and Deployment process.

Salary offered at entry level is typically INR 4L – 6L per annum in India.
 

Business Analyst

Qualifications required: Typically MBA (Fin.), CA, BE/MBA, NCFM certification holder, MCA are requirements for this role.

The BA plays a crucial role in IT companies as he acts as the bridge between end users (from the business) and developers.

The BA’s main task is requirement gathering from client/user and prepare various documents like BRD (Business Requirement Document), HLD (High Level Document), LLD (Low Level Document).

As an example, for payment processing applications, the analyst would need to understand the client’s business flow, relevant entities like the end user, payment gateway, validations, holiday impact, various charges. The analyst works in tandem with the application developer to arrive at the best possible solution for the client’s business requirements.

Salary offered at entry level is typically 5L to 6L per annum in India and increases on experience level.
 

Support Engineer

Qualifications required: Generally B.E., MCA, BSc (IT), BCA profiles are a good fit.

Typical role of Support Engineer in finance domain is to log L1/L2 type defects like for payment application payment not credited to payee’s account, Payment not stopped on holidays etc.

L1 support typically just to log the issue details and forward to respective teams for further investigation and resolution however L3 support needs thorough knowledge of application/domain to provide fix.

Salary offered at entry level is typically 3L to 5L per annum in India and increases on experience level.
 

Subject Matter Expert (SME) in Finance

Few Banks/Financial companies have flat hierarchies (they don’t follow traditional – Pyramid/Tree structure where Junior people reports to Senior and their work gets reviewed by seniors and every one’s scope is predefined and limited to their modules only) where SME plays mix role of BA and developer and sometimes holds additional responsibilities too.

SME needs to perform various roles, trains other team members, review design developed by others in team and make sure there are no issues with deliverables sent to client.

SME ideally have few characteristics i.e. solid domain/functional knowledge, leader ship qualities, good communication skills and ability to impart the knowledge.

Salary offered is typically 9L to 12L per annum in India and increases on experience level.
 

Associate Vice President (AVP IT)

In a few organizations, the SME can be promoted to an AVP role over a period of time. Alternatively, the AVP can also be the SME if needed.

The AVP holds a few additional responsibilities along with the SME role like multi-project / multi-team handling, responsibility for end-to-end project execution and the SPOC (single point of contact) for business users (to gather the requirement and provide the solution).

Salary offered is typically Rupees 12 Lakh to 15 Lakh per annum in India and increases with the experience.
 

Vice President (VP IT)

VP generally take cares of high level activities or any organizations and involves into key decisions about choosing right technology, preparing budget, selecting vendor (the company which outsource the tasks), recruits senior members and most importantly involves in BCP (Business Continuity Plan) activities.

Apart from these typical roles there are various others like Project Lead, Solution Architect, Consultant etc.. but more or less they perform either of the above responsibility.

Salary offered is typically Rupees 18 Lakh to 22 Lakh per annum in India.
 

Best companies for IT careers in finance

All the big investment banks and financial institutions have their own in-house technology teams to build and support their mission-critical financial applications.

Alternatively, there are quite a few companies which provide either services/support to Financial clients or develop products for them in India and abroad. A few are listed below.

  • FundTech
  • SunGard
  • Wipro
  • Cognizant
  • Syntel
  • Infosys
  • Polaris

 

What’s good and not-so-good about IT roles in finance

The good part is to work with multinational companies/clients, getting lucrative salaries and other growth options.

However one needs to be innovative, hard working and passionate about resolving client queries/issues to survive in this field.

Read about other careers in the IT industry.
 
Author Bio: Jignesh Maheshwari is MCA by qualification and has been working with IT consulting firms for past 12 years on various roles. Since last 7 years he has been working as techno functional professional on BFSI projects. The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of his employer.

Image Source: Yokogawa.com


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10 thoughts on “Technology jobs in the financial services industry | IT Careers”

  1. Please check my profile below.

    Grad – B.Sc.I.T.

    Work ex – 5 years as Software developer (ASP.NET & MS-SQL)

    I have not worked on Finance domain but is it currently in boom..?? I want to pursue PG with IT specialization along with job so what are good options available for me?? Is there any course which will help me to go for finance domain..?

    Also I am looking for EPGCITM (Executive Post Graduate Certificate in Information Technology Management) course by IIM Kozhikode. Is it worth by doing this course? Any idea about this??

    Please suggest me for same..

    Thanks & Regards
    Manoj

    Reply
  2. Hi Manoj,

    There are various distance learning courses available from IGNOU, SYMBIOSIS (SCDL), NMIMS, IIMs etc..

    To gain knowledge on finance domain, you can think of NCFM courses or distance MBA (Fin) , MBA (Banking) from reputed universities.

    IIMK certification would definitely add value to your profile.

    Regards,
    Jignesh

    Reply
  3. Nice Article .

    I understand Analytics and Finance Jobs are in boom & in next 10 years will be in scenario, but I don’t know how do I start a career in Business Analytics? And also confused that which field is better Big data Or Data Science Or Business Analyst ? And is there any industrial Training which will help me to pursue my career in this domain.

    Currently I am pursuing B.tech in IT. Please guide me on this??

    Regards
    Khushboo Chandak

    Reply
  4. I work for a Bangalore based Startup organization as the Lead Information Modeler and have 2+ years of decent experience in the following:

    1. Information/data Modeling SAP HANA
    2. Conepts of RDBMS, Excel pivots vlook etc
    3. HANA SQL Script,T-SQL,Stored procedures
    4. BI tools like Yellowfin,Nanobi etc.

    Currently we don’t have access to any SAP BI/BW or any SAP ERP for SLT etc. to practice any ETL or replication processes.
    My organization has 2 SAP validated Solutions but a statup has its own serious issues.

    My qualification is BCA(with study gap after 12th) and I want to become a Data Scientist.
    I plan to change my job a for better salary and more learning.

    I have a few very serious queries which will help me take some important decisions and they are listed as follows:

    Q1>Is it absolutely necessary for me to pursue a proper Master degree(MCA,MBA) in distance mode if I have to apply for jobs in reputed analytics firms or get promoted?

    If not mandatory then how else will it be beneficial for me?

    Q2>Considering R,SAS are the currently most popular analytics tools and jobs in HANA are few(and require much more work and all round technical experience than what I possess)

    So should I start learning R,SAS to give myself a chance of changing job or spend more time on HANA learning platform specific technical stuff to get a better job?

    Q3>If you suggest learning R,SAS as mandatory to become a data scientist then is doing the Jigsaw Academy’s “Data Science Course”properly be sufficient for me to get good job in Analytics or is it essential to enroll for the expensive 1 year certificate post graduation programs from Great Lakes,IIM-B or BOCCONI etc. for better placements.

    An elaborate reply would be very helpful as I need your expert advise to continue with my learning with a specific plan and make financial arrangements accordingly.

    Reply
  5. Khushboo,

    I would suggest you explore these areas and develop interest first, As a student you can get involved into preparing project/applications on BI tools, there are various tools available that you can start with available one.
    Along with tools knowledge one need experience as well to build a career in any area.

    Regards,
    Jignesh

    Reply
  6. Prateek,

    Very few IT companies have strict educational criteria for candidates but most of organizations look at the experience first, so higher study should not mandatory however PG course/Certification from reputed institutes would be value added for you if you wish to do.

    As you have around 3 years of experience only, I would suggest better stay in current profile and explore the other analytical tools mentioned above in free time, that will help you in future to grab any suitable opportunity.

    Regards,
    Jignesh

    Reply
  7. I am currently pursuing B.tech in CSE sector and also I have joined a course with IBM in business Analytics. So is it going to help me to get job in Business analyst????Also guide me that on what things I have to focus this 4 years to get job easily in finance or business IT sector.

    Reply
  8. Khyati,

    To get a job in Business Analysis field one needs good domain knowledge as well however exposure to Business Analytics tools will increase your chance to get job in that area.

    As I suggested try to get exposure of finance domain and focus on core subjects plus communication skills during your engineering to increase the chances to get selected in any good organization after completing your degree.

    Regards,
    Jignesh

    Reply
  9. Hello…
    I am currently wprking as a software developer in a startup. I work on .net and angular. But I would like to shift my roles to that of a business analyst. How do i proceed and what will be the job options. Thanks.

    Reply
  10. Hello Sir, I am a Bcom/ MBA Graduate with specialization in Marketing field. Presently working with a Asset Management Co., with past experience in Life Insurance. Total Experience of 11 Yrs. Now I want to switch my career into IT, but not finding a suitable path. Also would like to know what kind of courses will help me in getting into IT.

    Reply

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