Canada’s financial services sector helps drive IT jobs

Canada’s financial services sector gainfully employed 780,000 Canadians throughout 2014 and generated 6.8 per cent of the total gross domestic product. But according to a newly released report from the Conference Board of Canada, Canada’s IT businesses are huge beneficiaries of this success.

The report – An Engine for Growth: 2015 Report Card on Canada and Toronto’s Financial Services Sector – focuses mainly on Toronto, which is Canada’s financial hub and the location of more than 30 per cent of all financial service headquarters.

The report found that of the 29,834 professional service jobs in the city depend on the financial services sector, some 8.4 per cent (7,633) provided computer services – a figure, the report suggests, that reflects the industry’s heavy use of IT. Computer services are only slightly lower than consulting, the leading service used by Canada’s financial sector (as seen in the chart).

One area in particular that’s benefited from Canada’s strong financial services sector – which, the report states, is one of the strongest in the world – is that of data processing.

In Toronto alone, the report states, 1,582 data processing jobs were directly connected to the financial services sector, reflecting the data-intensive nature of the industry, particularly in transaction-oriented segments such as exchanges and banking.

But that’s not all. Canada’s IT sector also benefited tremendously from financial sector investment in equipment and services – somewhere to the tune of 51.8 per cent of total of total investment.

Click here to read the full Conference Board of Canada report.