When it comes to banks' technology investment priorities, the story of 2009 has been the need to bolster risk management systems. But IT infrastructure is still inadequate, and this looks like remaining a fertile ground for recruitment going into next year.

A new report by the Senior Supervisors Group (SSG) – a body made up of seven financial watchdogs including those in the UK and US – has said that insufficient investment in IT infrastructure continues to hinder risk management identification and measurement.

Financial services firms need to shift IT investment away from revenue generating areas and towards risk and reporting tools, says the report. There's need to ensure: "technology platforms are constructed to handle unexpected spikes in volumes and to effectively produce aggregated data and appropriate management information for credit, liquidity, market, and other risk metrics."

Still, there has been a major push to develop new risk management technology platforms this year, which has resulted in relatively aggressive levels of recruitment.

"Investment banks have been ploughing major sums of money into projects to develop systems to pull risk components out of various silos and build a transversal risk function," says Paul Bennie, director of Bennie MacLean, an investment banking technology headhunter. "It's difficult to think of a firm that's not looking to bring people on board."

However, headhunters tell us that Deutsche Bank, BarCap and HSBC have been particularly active in taking risk techies on.

"Roles around the development of risk and pricing IT systems are currently very prevalent," adds Oliver Hinchliffe, manager of the technology division at Project Partners. "A candidate that can combine technical proficiency with a deep understanding of the business area is very desirable at the moment."