The top universities for investment banking technology jobs

Investment banks don’t just hire investment bankers for their internship and graduate roles. If you study maths, computer science or another STEM subject, you could get a technology role in a bank, but which universities do banks love the most for these roles?

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We’ve analysed data from our CV database and publicly available information on LinkedIn for 16 major UK universities to provide a proprietary score for getting a banking technology job, looking at total alumni working in banking as well as intern/graduate level professionals. 

The results are clear. Imperial College is your best option, with next to no competition; it ranked first in every metric analysed and had almost triple the score of the second-best university, Warwick.

Many of the top technologists in banking worldwide have studied at Imperial.  David Coulson, a Goldman Sachs partner and CTO of banking and markets, studied a PhD in theoretical physics at Imperial while Citi’s chief technology officer, David Griffiths, has a computer science masters from the university. Citi’s chief information officer, Jonathan Lofthouse, studied at second-ranked Warwick.

Imperial ranks 22nd in the world for computer science in the QS university rankings, and third in the UK behind Oxford and Cambridge. Oxbridge graduates are less numerous in banking tech but are still present. They are favourites, for example, of electronic trading firms like Jane Street and Citadel Securities, which tend to pay their tech staff much more money and poach a lot of the top talent. Other top-ranked universities are typical broad banking target schools, including LSE and UCL in London.

Getting a graduate technology job in banking isn’t just about what school you attend. To get in, you’ll need to brush up on Leetcode problems to pass banking technology assessments, and you’ll probably need to have multiple personal projects or open-source contributions to stand out.

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