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Belfast is trying to promote itself as a financial centre to US banks. It could mean a big increase in jobs in Northern Ireland.

Last week Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness buried their political differences and donned their PR hats, as they travelled to the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) to woo international banks over to Northern Ireland, with a particular emphasis on the Republic’s benefits as a centre for IT.

One of the key aims of the NYSE trip was to sway JPMorgan Chase to jump into a such a venture, according to the Financial Times. Buy-side and sell-side technology vendor Fidessa is also understood to be considering a Belfast operation.

Belfast already hosts a thriving financial services IT community. Citigroup, for example, employs 400 people in its tech centre in Belfast – in areas of software development and support, technology infrastructure and operations – and plans to up that number to 700 by the end of 2009.

Insurer Liberty Mutual invested £6.6m and took on 240 staff for a new software development centre in September. At the time, Edmund F Kelly, chairman, president and CEO of the firm, said there was “effective momentum” to lure potential US investors.

However, Belfast is desperate for people with .Net, J2EE and C+++ skills, but is struggling to find the staff for the explosion in positions.

Northbrook Technology of Northern Ireland (NTNI), the software development arm of US insurer Allstate Corporation, employs 1,500 in the country. It said that a “serious shortage” of skilled IT workers had forced it to tap talent from India, Poland, Germany, Spain, Portugal and South Africa. Foreign employees now make up 20% of its NI workforce.

Ailish McDermott, IT consultant with Brightwater recruiters in Belfast, admits there is a skills shortage but reckons it’s set to change: “More and more university students are studying IT or financial services-related degrees because of the jobs being created by the international companies, which is developing a pool of talent.”

Invest NI claims that there’s an “excellent uptake” of finance, accounting, maths, statistics, engineering and computer science in the region at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels. More than 30,000 students are studying IT-related courses in Northern Ireland.