Sheryl Estrada | Fortune

April 12, 2023

Technology is changing how the financial services industry operates, like mobile and digital banking or virtual advisors. Digital transformation at the forefront of the industry means tech hiring is a must.

Tim Herbert, chief research officer at CompTIA, an IT industry group, tracks tech job postings in the U.S. across industries. I asked him to share his observations.

“The financial sector increased its share of tech job postings slightly during Q1 2023,” Herbert says. “On the one hand, tech hiring by financial companies is down relative to the highs of last year; on the other, the financial sector continues to outperform most other sectors on a relative basis.”

He continues, “Taking a longer-term view, all signs point to a continuation of strong demand by financial services firms for software development, data science and analytics, cybersecurity, cloud infrastructure, and A.I. skills. The data suggests any lull in hiring is likely to be relatively short-lived.”

In Q1 2023, the finance and insurance sector represented 18.7% of tech job postings in the U.S., compared to 18.2% the same time the year prior and 15.4% in Q1 2021, according to CompTIA’s data. That came second to the traditional tech job category of professional, scientific, and technical services, with 25.7% in Q1 2023, down from 28.1% in Q1 2022 and 32.1% the year prior.

“After the record volumes of job postings during the second and third quarters of last year, there was the expected regression to the mean with employer hiring activity,” Herbert says. Big tech companies like Amazon, Salesforce, and Meta have attributed over-hiring as a factor in recent mass layoffs at the companies. Meta, which laid off 11,000 employees in November, announced it would terminate an additional 10,000 jobs and halt hiring for 5,000 open positions. In one of his latest pieces, my colleague Geoff Colvin asks: Are layoffs a confession of bad management?

Regarding tech in the financial services industry, Rob Alexander, CIO at Capital One, recently discussed the company’s hiring plans with me. “Our tech organization is actively recruiting for a range of positions, including engineering roles focused on cloud, data, machine learning, and cybersecurity, as well as product managers and technical program managers.” Alexander says that “machine learning, A.I., and real-time data are central to how we build our products and services for customers and to how we run our company.”

Meanwhile, insurance giant Prudential Financial is using A.I. to accelerate many individual life underwriting processes from 22 days to 22 seconds, and digital claims processing capability to deliver funds to most customers in six hours as opposed to six days.

The tech jobs of tomorrow, it seems, may look a lot like finance jobs.