TEXT 4.1. BANK ON A FUTURE AS A CITY TRADER

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 359.

I expected to find a group of excited students in brightly coloured jackets, thrusting their arms about while barking orders into telephones. The reality was more sober: a classroom of 30 or so students calmly clicking away, each in front of twin computer screens, studying strange figures and graphs as a tutor instructed them via a large projector.

This is University College London's "virtual trading floor" or, more accurately, the "financial computing laboratory". It's all part of a new Masters course, MSc financial computing, which aims to take students from non-technical backgrounds and carve them into banking whizz-kids.

The project is being sponsored by Reuters and has been developed in partnership with four of the biggest investment banks in the City: Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse and Merrill Lynch. The aim of the laboratory is to give students a flavour of life in financial services and recreate the excitement of a trading floor.

So where are all the blazer-wearing brokers? "They're a dying breed," says Christopher Clack, the course leader. "These days everything is done by computer. This is the future."

Whilst on the trading floor, students get the chance to handle live data from the major world stock exchanges. They will then be able to manipulate that data, using the same software used in the banks, and do some virtual trading. Reuters delivers the data, while the banks and UCL deliver the course content.

"The students see all this real-time data coming in and they get a good understanding of how the financial instruments work," says Clack. "That's how they learn, and how the banks can get the best of the best."

Some will raise eyebrows that it is UCL pioneering a virtual stock exchange and not the London School of Economics or Imperial College London, both of which have strong reputations in economics and technology. But that is precisely the reason that the banks chose UCL over other institutions.

"We wanted a broader intake and a more diverse set of students in terms of background, ethnicity, gender," says Adrian Pearce, head of global technology at Merrill Lynch. "UCL was interesting to us in the breadth of postgraduate students that they could attract."

It seems that for a financial technology course, the programme is decidedly anti-technology. Indeed, you can't take the course if you're an IT or computer science graduate, or if you've studied more than three modules of computer science at undergraduate level. So how do you get on the course? This year students had to first line up a host bank, with whom they would carry out a project placement. Other than that, they had to show a capability for analytical thought and persuade Clack that they have what it takes to make it in the City.

Of the 45 students on the oversubscribed programme, more than two thirds are from overseas and nearly half are women, which is unheard of for computer science, and the engineering department that houses it. Susan Taylor-Martin, managing director of Reuters UK and Ireland, thinks that this is due to the type of course.

"What's fantastic about this course is it's a transitional 'switching' course, designed for people who've done arts degrees or something non-technical and want to switch into something more technical," she says. "Suddenly that gives a completely different flavour to the gender make up. It's going to be interesting if the UK offers more of these courses where you give people a steep learning curve into a technically-orientated degree."

Akbota Biyarova, 23, is typical of this atypical course. Hailing from Kazakhstan, she is keen to develop skills she saw lacking at her Kazakh bank. "In my company, the IT and finance departments didn't understand each other," she says. "I want to improve my skills to be able to do both." The students are enjoying using the software and the lab. They are very smart guys, and it's a unique course, in the way that it combines financial knowledge and IT. It's useful for the companies because they are all looking for something unique: unique knowledge, unique people, unique students."

v Read and learn about three key points the students need in order to stand out from the crowd of job hunters