Finance

Since its creation in 1987 the International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), and the financial sector in general, has enjoyed enormous success in Ireland. There was a net trade surplus of €4.9 billion in IFSC activities in 2004 and exports – comprising mainly insurance, financial and business services – have grown by 234 per cent since 1999. Employment in the industry has also undergone a dramatic growth; approximately 18,000 are currently employed directly by the financial services.

According to Kennedy O’Brien of Finance magazine, the finance sector here will maintain ‘a steady growth, there are some fears out there about issues such as the securitisation market, but Ireland still has a huge advantage in terms of clustering – there’s a lot here already that attracts other companies, and also the tax benefits of course.’ A poll at a conference recently organised by the magazine found that the attending ‘heads of business by and large agreed that there will be a doubling of those working in the financial services by 2016/2017’. Coupled with an ongoing skills shortage, the financial sector (at home and abroad) is an excellent market for graduates at the moment.

The National College of Ireland (NCI) provides postgraduates with the opportunity to study finance on a state of the art campus at the very centre of Ireland’s financial sector, the IFSC. ‘We’re very fortunate in that a high proportion of our lecturing staff, particularly on our MA Finance programme, are practitioners and leaders within the field of finance who bring what they do in the workplace into the classroom. It is essential that graduates have an understanding of not just the theoretical underpinning of financial models and markets but also a keen understanding of how these markets and models works in practice,’ says Course Director Corina Sheerin, ‘the unique selling point of the MA programme would be that our course content is very heavily aligned with the Chartered Financial Analysts’ body of knowledge.’

The MA is a two-year part time programme. Many of the students are employed in the IFSC and are often sponsored by their employer. ‘Employers are aware that our course is very practical as well as being at a high level academically, it does focus on the skills that are necessary in the workplace. In addition, students do a dissertation as part of the programme that is very related to their own areas of work, for example leveraged buy-outs or capital asset pricing model applications: thus reinforcing the attractiveness of the programme to employers,’ says Ms Sheerin.

Feedback from graduates of the course has been very positive, with many gaining promotion with the help of their new qualification, both within their companies or gaining new positions elsewhere (often abroad). ‘The financial services is a very competitive sector, and I think having a postgraduate qualification in this environment is essential,’ concludes Ms Sheerin.

It is important to remember when discussing postgraduate options in finance that a career in the industry does not necessarily entail upping sticks and moving to Dublin and the IFSC. ‘A big development is going to be regionalisation, I think you’re going to see a lot of services operating outside Dublin – Cork is growing,’ says Kennedy O’Brien, and as Corina Sheerin points out, a number of financial companies are locating outside the capital, such as IFS, KPMG (both Galway) and Daiwa (Louth).

The MSc in Financial Services provided by the University of Limerick is a one-year full time programme that has pioneered the use of trading simulations within the university sector. Students are able to actively manage a portfolio of stocks, bonds and futures, thus providing them with excellent training in preparation for a career in the frenetic marketplace. UL’s MSc in Computational Finance also makes use of simulated ‘live’ financial markets. According to Kennedy O’Brien, compliance managers (who can expect an average salary of €75,000) and risk managers are two roles which are currently suffering the most from a lack of qualified graduates, and this MSc programmes is an excellent route toward both careers among others. Another postgraduate pathway to a career in compliance management is the Executive MBA in Regulation and Compliance, provided by the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School.

Finance conversion courses are available to third level graduates seeking to change direction and land a potentially lucrative career in the financial sector. The Masters Qualifying Programme (MQP) in the NCI and the Higher Diploma in Finance in NUI Maynooth are two such courses. According to Margaret Hurley, course coordinator in Maynooth, the course was originally created for the university’s economics graduates who were seeking to enter the finance sector. Such was the popularity of the course however that entrants now include graduates from fields as diverse as anthropology and engineering. Besides the roughly estimated one third of graduates who go on to further study at Masters level, graduates progress to good careers in places such as the IFSC, the ESRI, European Central Bank and the Dept of Finance.

The only course of its kind in Ireland, the Financial & Industrial Mathematics MSc in DCU is a postgraduate course for graduates of maths degrees. The programme focuses on high-level mathematics applied to practical problems in finance and industry, and equips postgrads with the computational and stochastic techniques that are currently in high demand in the finance sector.

A recent survey funded by the City of London, the Global Financial Centres Index, ranked Ireland as the 15th most important financial centre in the world. Postgraduates programmes in finance represent a fantastic opportunity to become a part of this dynamic industry, with an array of well-payed and intellectually challenging roles awaiting the skilled graduate at home and abroad.