Which job is better in a bank?

I majored in computer science, and during the campus recruitment period, I received offers from the head office of China Everbright Bank, Bank of China, Communications Bank, China Merchants Bank, CITIC Bank and other banks, as well as offers from many major Internet companies.

After I started working, many people came to consult me ​​about their job search experience, and many people also shared their feelings about joining the IT position of a bank. First of all, it should be made clear that the concept of a bank is really too big. There are huge differences between different banks, and the positions within the same bank are also very different. For example, can the IT position at the bank headquarters be on the same level as the grassroots teller? So what positions are better in a bank? I will analyze from the perspective of an IT practitioner, mainly divided into three parts: what positions are there in a bank, vertically looking at the IT positions of a bank, and horizontally looking at the technology positions of a bank.

1. What are the positions in banks?

The positions and departments of a bank can be roughly divided into front, middle and back offices. Generally speaking, there are several principles for the division:

The front desk department is those who face customers directly and deal directly with our customers, such as the counter staff you see when you go to deposit or withdraw money, the account manager who helps you with your financial management, and the lobby manager who guides you in the hall, they all belong to this category.

The middle office does not have direct contact with customers, and is mainly responsible for business operations or providing professional support to the front office, as well as risk control. For example, it decides whether to lend money to people (credit approval), how to control possible risks (risk management department), and so on.

The back-end department is responsible for providing administrative, logistical and technical support for the bank's operations, such as functional departments such as human resources, office, discipline inspection and supervision, trade union, youth league committee and our information technology positions.

The bank technology position is the back-end department of the bank. Its advantage is that it does not need to go through the branch rotation practice common in business positions. Even if there is such an arrangement in the early stage, it is only a short two-week experience. Compared with the highly competitive environment of the Internet industry, the bank technology position can still have a work-life balance under normal leadership. Especially in the context of frequent layoffs in the Internet industry in recent years, although the work intensity of the bank information technology position has also increased, as long as you are a formal employee recruited by the bank through campus recruitment, you will generally not be fired or dismissed. It can be regarded as a relatively good safe haven.

Next, we will analyze what information technology positions are available in banks and which positions are more recommended.

2. Vertical view of information technology positions

Vertically from the headquarters to the cities, it can be divided into the following parts.

Head Office : Technology Management Department of the Head Office

Directly affiliated units : Software Development Center, Data Center

Provincial Technology Post : Provincial Company Information Technology Post

Subsidiary : Xinke Subsidiary

The comprehensive ranking from the perspective of career and money is as follows:

Head Office > R&D Center = Data Center > Provincial Information Technology Post > Subsidiary

Due to individual differences, the head office's technology management department is not necessarily better than software development . The head office's information management position rarely recruits people, and most of the time they do some material and clerical work, rather than engaging in specific product development. Choosing the head office means that you have to give up the programmer's specialty "programming", which is very suitable for some students who already hate writing code. Of course, if you love code very much and hate writing materials and clerical documents, choosing the head office is not a "good" position.

In the selection process of the Head Office Information Technology Department and its subordinate units, I would like to emphasize one point:

Each bank has a different definition of IT department and software development.

The IT department of some banks is actually a soft opening, while the IT department of Bank of China is a real management position. Here is a good way to choose an offer: the one that hires fewer people is a management position, and the one that hires more people is a soft opening. Good positions will never hire many people, and those that hire more people are definitely not good positions.

In addition, when applying for bank IT positions, people are very afraid of being "subsidiaryized." The reason for this is that in 2018, China Construction Bank started a trend by transferring all of its head office-affiliated software development centers to its subsidiary, CCB Financial Technology. Software development employees signed new contracts, changing from employees of the CCB head office to employees of CCB Financial Technology's subsidiary, which reduced their stability.

Therefore, compared with subsidiaries, it is better to choose corporate units within the bank.

In the actual operation process, the direct units such as Soft Open are mainly responsible for banking business, and the subsidiaries are mainly responsible for the business that the China Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission does not allow banks to operate, but is required by the bank in its actual operation. Common subsidiaries include ABC Financial Technology, BOC Financial Technology, ABC Life Insurance, BOC Life Insurance, etc. It is a state-owned enterprise, but it also participates in market competition. To put it bluntly, everyone studies computer science in state-owned enterprises, mainly for stability. State-owned enterprises are unstable, so why not work harder to join Internet companies that compete purely in the market?

The outcome of being neither good nor bad is that you get the best of both worlds: neither the technological advancement brought about by market competition nor the job stability brought about by organizational care.

3. Horizontal view of information technology positions

Information technology positions can be mainly divided into R&D department, operation and maintenance department, algorithm department, etc. For general department selection, after joining the company, the company will first collect job aspirations, such as whether you want to work in software development, operation and maintenance, data, security or human resources. Then rotate to various positions to familiarize yourself with the business process. Finally, the leader will determine the position based on personal wishes and actual job vacancies.

Below Taking soft opening as an example we will briefly introduce the characteristics of each position.

R&D Post

In daily banking development, the technology is generally not particularly new. Generally, the front end is JSP, the back end is Springboot, and the logic is all about table design and addition, deletion, modification and query. In the process of system development, there are countless documents, business knowledge sorting, and approval confirmation at every level.

Operation and Maintenance Post

Banks have relatively high requirements for system stability and concurrency, so the requirements for operation and maintenance positions are relatively high. Depending on the actual production cycle, there may be night shifts and 24-hour standby.

Safety Post

Mainly responsible for security review, security testing (penetration testing, vulnerability scanning, etc.), formulation of security standards, cooperation with supervision, etc.

Algorithm Post

In order to maintain competitiveness and innovation, large banks and other financial institutions often set up their own innovation labs or research centers. These institutions focus on exploring and developing new technologies, new business models, and advanced algorithms to improve the efficiency, security, and customer experience of financial services. What they study is generally related to the cutting-edge technology trends of the country and the industry. For example, big models are popular now, so you can apply big models to the financial industry. Here are a few examples: the Agricultural Bank of China's artificial intelligence research and development team launched ChatABC, an AI big model application similar to ChatGPT, and China Mobile launched the Jiutian·Zhongqing Base Big Model, both of which originated from this position.

The above mentioned are all job distributions within directly affiliated units. My personal suggestion is that if you want to go to a state-owned enterprise for research and development, you must accept its backward technology stack, complicated approval processes, various material PPTs and other problems.

When choosing a position, you should see which positions can be integrated with the business to the greatest extent, so that technology + business is your core competitiveness. It is not recommended to join low-code, operation and maintenance and other departments. Long-term repetition and non-business involvement are not conducive to the growth of one's own technology and business.