Investment banks are creating more than half the new IT jobs in financial services.

That's according to research from ReThink Recruitment, the IT staffing company, which says investment banks accounted for 57% of IT jobs in its research, based on a sample of 2,093 job adverts.

At the same time, it points to a decline in demand from the high street retail banks, which now account for just 16% of new jobs.

Jon Butterfield, ReThink director, said: “Online banking created a big demand for IT skills from high street banks but five years on the use of technology as a competitive tool in the retail banking sector seems to have tailed off.”

He added that offshoring has had a “huge impact” on IT staffing levels in the retail banking sector. “A lot of IT support and data processing functions have been shipped overseas, so the huge volume of low-end IT jobs is simply no longer there.”

“Investment banks tend to develop their own IT infrastructure, such as front-end trading platforms, whereas retail banks tend to rely more on standard software packages supplied by third party vendors.”

Insurance accounts for 18% of new jobs. Traditional fund management (6%) and hedge funds (3%) make up the remainder.

Butterfield said candidates with programming languages such as C++ are “highly desirable”.