Talan is an international advisory group on innovation and transformation through technology, with 5000 employees, and a turnover of 600M€.

We offer our customers a continuum of services to support you at each key stage of your organization's transformation, with 4 main activities:

• CONSULTING in management and innovation : supporting business, managerial, cultural, and technological transformations.
• DATA & TECHNOLOGY to implement major transformation projects.
• CLOUD & APPLICATION SERVICES to build or integrate software solutions.
• SERVICE CENTERS of EXCELLENCE to support the latter through technology, innovation, agility, sustainability of skills and cost optimization.

Talan accelerates it's clients' transformation through innovation and technology. By understanding their challenges, with our support, innovation, technology and data, we enable them to be more efficient and resilient.
We believe that only a human oriented-practice of technology will make the new digital age an era of progress for all. Together let's commit!

Our banking client is about to start a major overhaul of its core fixed income & derivatives pricing, risk and analytics ecosystem delivered by the Quants. This currently consists of:

·      core pricing and analytics libraries exposed as an Excel add-in

·      systems using these libraries, such as standard interest rate curve generation and publication, risk bucket and portfolio risk analysis, pricing of swaps lists, sales-trader voice-trading workflows integrated with pricing tools, and various other smaller applications.

These are mainly Excel-based and run by traders on their desktops, and ad-hoc services within a back-end framework, using older technologies.

The client has now reached a stage where to meet its new challenging business targets what is now needed is:

·      the whole ecosystem to be brought inside a formalized IT infrastructure,

·      using modern cloud-based services at the back end, with Openfin-based front ends to deliver the main applications to the traders and sales,

·      improving and modernizing the API interface to the core libraries and other services,

·      retaining the Excel interface to the new core libraries to retain that flexibility and to allow prototyping,

·      improving speed, scalability, security, and supportability of the whole platform by the IT function

Role Description

They are looking for a Senior Analyst, experienced in working with trading floor Quants in the fixed income and credit derivatives space, with some overlap with FX. Ideally, this person has played a major role in performing similar overhauls at other investment banks.

The role of the Business Analyst will be critical to ensure full definition, visibility and understanding of the requirements across all stakeholders, and to communicate the detail of the requirements to the technical teams and architectural lead, to ensure delivery of a high-quality solution.

The Business Analyst will also perform project management functions; tracking and communicating progress to stakeholders, senior management and to the Rates/Credit Program Manager.

The client uses the Agile methodology, so the Business Analyst will be responsible for maintaining the Epics and User Stories consistent with a Roadmap, and for building out the content of the User Stories for consumption by the development and testing / QA teams.

Essential Skills / Experience

·      Experience in working with Quants (or similar, who typically build core pricing and analytics libraries for Fixed Income Bonds, Swaps, Credit Derivatives and FX), and knowledge of such libraries and functions.

·      Technical knowledge at high-level; while the candidate will not be required to define the details of the solution, they need to have good grasp of technical matters and to work closely with the technical team, in the context of a high performance, lower latency, scalable, modern, cloud-based architecture.

·      Experience in requirements definition and requirements gathering and working with end-users, technical teams, and other stakeholders, in a formal structured IT project environment.

·      Exposure to Agile requirements gathering and scrum / sprint cadences.

·      Project management, tracking and communication to stakeholders and senior management.

·      Senior, experienced, easy to work with, diplomatic and collaborative.

Desirable (but not essential)

·      A major consideration is, has this person already played a major role in performing similar overhauls as described above, at other investment banks

Qualities

·      Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills,

·      Strong written and verbal communication skills in English,

·      The ability to learn quickly and absorb new information,

·      Energetic, motivated, and determined,

·      Pragmatic and results-oriented,

·      Productive and able to manage time effectively.

Qualifications Required

Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information technology or a related field, or substantial practical experience of software delivery at an advanced level.