MD hires at JPMorgan & UBS show the technologists banks want now

As third quarter results have amply illustrated, most banks need to cut costs and therefore have put a hold on all but essential hiring. The exception is technology. Technology is the new gold rush town in banking. If you go there, you'll find every bank producing code, trying to automate businesses and talking up the investments it's making in electronic trading.

Within technology, the two biggest gold rush areas are anything to do with the cloud and anything to do with automating the bloated compliance function. Both JPMorgan and UBS have just made senior hires illustrating this.

JPMorgan recruited Lily Wang from Goldman Sachs for its New York office. Wang was Goldman's global compliance technology head and she seems to be doing something similar for JPM, where she'll be head of technology innovations and head of technology for financial crimes compliance. Wang joined as an MD.

UBS, which is now cutting CHF90m from costs, also made an MD level technology recruit. The bank just added Steven Jeffrey as global head of its 'cloud office'. Despite the title, Jeffrey will be based in London. He last worked for healthcare company GlaxoSmithKine, where he managed the technology infrastructure.

As we reported earlier this week, both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are building out cloud teams. JPMorgan has been hiring in Seattle, where it's poaching from the likes of Microsoft. Goldman Sachs' new CIO Marco Argenti comes from Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he ran cloud services in particular.

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