City IT pay rates top £1,000 per day

Top IT workers in the City of London are commanding salaries of £1,000 per day or more as banks start to invest in upgrades to their technology again.

New trading systems, security and compliance projects such as Basel II and Sarbanes-Oxley are making financial services a boom area for tech workers.

Neil Pilkington, managing consultant at IT staffing company ReThink Recruitment, said there is a "real surge of upgrades" as finance houses look to update trading systems to trade faster - and make money quicker.

Pilkington said: "You can almost see the wave moving across [the City] and at the moment - there's much more complicated stuff going on."

There are around 110,000 people working in financial services IT - 83,000 men and 27,000 women, according to the Labour Force Survey of autumn last year.

The biggest single group - 35,000 - describe themselves as software professionals, with the next largest group - 20,000 - identifying themselves as info/comms technology managers.

According to figures from the Association of Technology Staffing Companies (ATSCo), contractors in the City earn between £50 and £59 per hour - roughly £50,500 per annum, at an average rate of employment through a year. In contrast contractors working in the public sector look to trouser £37 per hour (£28,000), and those in telecoms £36 per hour (£36,400).

Contract rates in the City have risen between 10 to 15 per cent over the last year, said ATSCo.

Insurance and investment banking continue to be hot areas for contractors and while retail banking has fewer opportunities the continued rollout and enhancement of chip and PIN services is creating demand for security and networking specialists, the organisation said.

Business analysts and security consultants also remain in demand: pay for IT security consultants rose on average by 22 per cent last year, business analysts by about 15 per cent.

Alain Cheenne, regional director at recruitment company Michael Page Technology, said: "Financial services has always wanted the best people and clients know that the best way to get them is to pay them well."

And that means big pay packets for workers with in-demand skills.

He said: "We've got people earning up to £600 and £700 a day. Some very specialist high level project managers earn £800. It's been going up for about 18 months steadily."

Workers with expert knowledge of derivatives or equities or specialised financial packages are in great demand, Cheenne said, and increasingly IT workers are leaving full-time jobs and moving into contracting.

But this doesn't mean the City is embarking on a hiring frenzy, he warned: "I don't thing that clients are willing at the moment to look at people that don't have a financial services background. Some candidates that haven't got a financial services background and would like to get into it are finding it quite difficult."

Ian Blackburn, managing director of AMTech, the IT division of Angela Mortimer recruitment agreed that while the market is buoyant it is not anywhere near as hot as it was in the run up to the millennium. "People are getting over-excited about the market," he said.

According to Blackburn, there is good demand for project managers with an investment bank background on rates of around £500 to £550 per day. And programme managers or directors could be looking at £1,000 per day, he said.

Blackburn added: "What we are seeing is a resurgence of confidence in the IT marketplace and people are moving contracts on and demand has risen."