The International Financial Services Centre (IFSC), Dublin.

The Irish Government through Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) is to invest €4.7m in a new financial  mathematics research centre, to be known as the Financial Mathematics and Computation Cluster (FMC).

SFI said the research activities of the FMC2 research cluster will create a centre of financial research excellence by bringing together complementary expertise in financial mathematics, financial economics and computer science. Research at FMC2 will initially concentrate on the development of theory and methods for the task of asset management to greatly enhance the development of, and future employment growth in, the international financial services industry in Ireland.

Much of the employment at the Dublin International Financial Services Centre (IFSC) but it's not clear how the research would feed in to the operations of Wall Street firms.

The IFSC generates about €22 billion a year in services exports.

The FMC2 is led by Professor Anthony Brabazon of University College Dublin (UCD) and will involve collaboration with researchers in Dublin City University, NUI Maynooth, University of Ulster, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), Columbia University, Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Technical University of Kaiserslautern, Germany.

Industry partners involved with the project so far are Pioneer Investments, Ryan Capital Ltd and The Institute of Bankers in Ireland.

Professor Anthony Brabazon, head of the FMC2 reserch team, re-iterating the strategic relevance of the centre to the financial services industry in Ireland said“Of course, firms in the IFSC are facing ever increasing pressures from competitors in other jurisdictions so we need to ‘up our game’ if we want to continue to grow employment in this sector. A key enabling factor is the deepening of the pool of high-calibre, financially-trained graduates with quantitative skills for employment in financial services firms.

This cluster forms a pivotal element of national infrastructure, creating a critical-mass research centre which will undertake research and training for the financial services industry. A prime objective of the research cluster is to support industry product and process innovation in order to grow employment in the financial services sector in Ireland. The cluster’s researchers will be working directly with our industrial collaborators in order to help achieve this goal,” he added.