In what may be an early sign that financial services technology budgets are at least stabilizing, a number of bankers, headhunters and technology companies say they have noticed an uptick in demand for executives with e-banking skills.
Such jobs have been scarce for a year or so. Banks pulled back from new technology amid the dot-com bust and the economic slump. Downsizing also took a toll.
But the Internet kept growing as a banking channel. High-speed connections became more common in homes, and new services became available, such as high-quality check images that can be viewed online.
"The larger, more progressive banks have decided now is the time to focus on infrastructure," said William Randle, a former executive vice president at Huntington Bancshares Inc. in Columbus, Ohio, who now heads WMR e-Ventures LLC, a technology venture capital firm that is the principal shareholder of the software vendor e-Bank.
"The worst of the recession is behind us, and now is the time to focus on the future," Mr. Randle said. "We've got to get beyond the first level of implementation to the second level of implementation. I think that's why you're seeing the interest in recruitment."
Outsourcing trends have cut both ways. Some financial companies, including Bank One Corp., are consolidating all technology in-house - and have been hiring technology executives to help. Others, American Express Co. among them, are relying more on vendors - so some e-banking executives are repackaging themselves as vendors or consultants.
Mellon Financial Corp. has been doing some e-banking hiring, but it has been "very spotty, very focused," said Janey Place, an executive vice president of the Pittsburgh company who is the president of its Mellon Lab technology incubator.
Like many banking companies, Mellon prefers to promote internally, Ms. Place said. "Understanding our businesses is the fundamental requirement," she said. "E-business skills people can probably learn."
Nevertheless it hired an outsider to fill one of the three e-banking executive jobs that came open in recent months, she said.
Meanwhile, Ms. Place said, she is getting lots of networking-type calls from headhunters looking for people to fill e-banking jobs in other companies. "I'm seeing an uptick. People are recruiting for a lot more of these jobs."
Two headhunters who specialize in financial technology disagreed on whether the market is improving.
Mark Esposito, a managing director at the New York recruiting firm Christian & Timbers, maintains that it is. Demand for e-banking executives is up 50% from a year ago, he said. "There's a lot of action in this space all of a sudden," he said. "I'm starting to believe this market is actually turning."
He acknowledged that some banks are still cutting jobs, but he argued that the environment makes it timely to look to hire. "It's a great time to be a buyer" of e-banking talent, he said.
The online success of Bank of America Corp., for which Mr. Esposito said he is doing some recruiting, may have triggered some of the renewed interest, he said. "B of A's numbers have surprised a lot of people," Mr. Esposito said. The Charlotte, N.C., company, which declined to discuss e-banking recruiting for this story, has more online banking customers than any other U.S. banking company and has been marketing aggressively.
But John Barrett, a managing director at the Boston recruiting firm Conley & Co., said he is "hard-pressed to see much evidence of any uptick out there for e-banking executives."
The emphasis today is on multichannel strategies, efficiency, and integration of services, Mr. Barrett said. Besides, since the dot-com meltdown "there is still tremendous availability of e-banking executives," he said.
"To the extent that banks need this talent or use it, they have it in-house. There are people left over from the major initiatives of the last two or three years."
Among them is Harry Stubbs, a former Bank of America vice president who was laid off at the end of March. Mr. Stubbs said that he and some B of A colleagues in Baltimore lost their jobs when the company decided to consolidate some technical operations. "I didn't want to go to Charlotte for a lateral move," he said.
Mr. Stubbs said he tried a relatively conventional job search at first and landed three or four quick interviews after posting his resume on the Monster.com job board. "People were really amazed by the work I had done" as a project manager, he said.
But he decided that rather than sign on as an employee "I might be better off marketing it to banks individually." He hung out a shingle as Stubbs Project Management.
"Now I spend my time prospecting for clients," he said. He has not scored any contracts yet, he said, but "there's definitely a lot of good demand for good project managers."
