Bank of England hires 145 IT staff for Prudential Regulatory Authority

The Bank of England is to hire 145 IT staff for its new financial services regulatory body, the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA)

The Bank of England is to hire 145 IT staff to fill roles in its new financial services watchdog the Prudential Regulatory Authority (PRA).

The PRA is tasked with ensuring financial institutions have the appropriate levels of liquidity to withstand a crisis.  It will have a total of 1,100 staff and is due to be established by early 2013 in Moorgate.

“It is about scaling up the organisation and growing capability,” Bank of England CIO Simon Moorhead told Computer Weekly.

Moorhead said the recruitment will involve a broad range of roles, building on the bank’s existing teams in enterprise architecture, applications, infrastructure and service management.

The PRA will also share systems with the Bank of England, such as email and mobile device support. 

“I am hoping the Bank of England's off-the-shelf service will be quite attractive to the PRA - such as our knowledge and information systems,” said Moorhead.

The use of business intelligence tools will also play a key role in the subsidiary. 

“The analytics that support front line economist functions are driven by BI. That will be important for the PRA, which is taking responsibility for regulating information in banks and insurance companies,” said Moorhead.

The body will also see improved capability in third party IT management: “We do have a chunk of external relations and the PRA will bring some more of those,” said Moorhead.

“Part of the intent of the integration of the PRA into the Bank of England is to make sure we can support judgement-led supervision. So experienced supervisors can make decisions based on information that is here and provided in a timely way by our team. 

"We will focus on the provision of that information at the right time and delivering the right insight.

Moorhead said the two organisations could mutually benefit from each others in-house IT expertise."The ability is there to really raise the bar in IT operations in the bank, which is already pretty high," he said.

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