MSc in Software Engineering for Financial Services

Outline

Students at the computer

Financial services are not only one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy but also one of the two largest customers of IT! This MSc is offered together with the Department of Economics in order to give you both a command of the software technologies that financial institutions require to "embrace the challenge of change" and of the business context and organisational structures that IT systems need to support.

This MSc programme concentrates on architectures for building scalable financial software systems, thus preparing software engineers for a plethora of jobs in the financial industry. In particular it considers technologies and techniques that are particularly relevant for the challenges of the financial market, predominantly a need to migrate from mission-critical, monolithic legacy systems to more flexible architectures that allow speedy reaction to customer and business partner’s needs. The technical aspect must be seen in the context of the business environment, where software engineers typically interact with a world of financial jargon and departments with specialised roles and needs.

The market

A special volume of the magazine Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery dedicated to New Architectures for Financial Services identifies two main challenges that modern financial systems are having to address:

Advancements in telecommunications in general and the internet in particular are having deep consequences on the way financial institutions make their services available and make business. The availability and diversity of delivery channels requires that the information systems that support the core business are endowed with a robust but flexible software architecture that can accommodate new ways of making business while preserving core business invariants.
The speed with which new products need to be launched into the market, new regulations come into force, and mergers and acquisitions take place among financial institutions, is not compatible with the monolithic legacy systems that are still operating in most organisations. In response to these circumstances, new ICT-based or ICT-enabled architectures for technology and organization are beginning to emerge in the financial services industry.

This view is strengthened by the report Business 2010: Financial Services published by the Economist Intelligence Unit, which is aptly subtitled "Embracing the challenge of change". This is what the report concludes:

Industry leaders are aware that nurturing the ability to adapt to change is the single most important challenge facing their firms. They also recognise the need to be fast, and just as well. Technology is making it possible for small players to launch innovative new services quickly, and for customers to switch to them just as fast. In this sense, IT offers financial industry firms both immense opportunity and certain competitive threats. Executives realise that how they use IT will do much to determine their ability to face up to the competitive challenges of the next five years.

In summary, there is a big market for software engineering skills directed to the methods and techniques that are required for designing and deploying new software architectures for financial services, and for re-engineering legacy systems to operate on these new architectures.