The investment bank technology teams with the best names

Next time you apply for a technology job in an investment bank, you might want to pay close attention to the name of the team you're joining. Banks like to give their technology teams names, and they can be unusual.

No one's likely to pass-up an opportunity to join a technology team just because it's called Rancid Pineapple (this name has yet to be used), but the names themselves are informative. - They reflect the culture of the bank (fun/warlike/futuristic). They're also a helpful way to remember the key projects each bank is working on.

1. Barclays' Beowulf team

Well, Barclays has got a team named after a Scandinavian hero who rips a monster's arm off and later cuts off the monster's mother's head. 

If you join Barclays' Beowulf team, you will be fighting a different kind of monster. Beowulf is the name of the British bank's strategic risk engine for its investment bank. A bit like SecDB at Goldman Sachs or Quartz and Athena at Bank of America and JPMorgan, Beowulf calculates Barclays' combined market risk exposure across fixed income asset classes. If you work here, you'll probably need to code in C# and .Net 4 or C++ or Java.

2. Credit Suisse's giraffes in the Zoo 

Credit Suisse has a strategic risk platform for its equities business called Giraffe and the Giraffe project at the bank is called the Zoo. Developers who work on Giraffe at the Swiss bank are therefore referred to as Giraffes in the Zoo. If you want to be one, you'll need to code in Java, Python, Clojure or Javascript.

3. Deutsche Bank's Fabric team 

Fabric is best known as one of London's largest nightclubs, but at Deutsche Bank it refers to a cloud-based network that allows technologists to access Deutsche's data and co-create applications that are relevant to the bank's clients. Fabric was an initiative of John Cryan; it's not clear how it's faring under Christian Sewing.

4. Goldman Sachs' new ION team

ION isn't on the same level as 'Giraffe', but Goldman Sachs' team is interesting in itself. In recently placed job adverts, the firm says ION is a 'a newly formed team with a mandate to design and build applications to power market making and risk management for standardized products in FICC.' 

Unusually, ION sits across Goldman's technology and its securities divisions. In other words, if you're a Goldman FICC trader currently trading standardized flow products, it is the ION team that will be looking at how to automate your job. No particular coding language is specified, but Goldman says members of ION will be responsible for the full application software stack and will therefore need to code Javascript as well as Java, for example. 

Photo by Kellie Patton on Unsplash

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