London Stock Exchange (LSE) is investing heavily in IT to counter competition from a new breed of tech-savvy trading facilities, which is creating some jobs within the organization itself and will also result in an increased workload for member companies.

For the last year, LSE's 300-strong tech team has been focusing on the integration of its systems with Borsa Italiana, a process that has now been completed. Now, it's both rolling out a new "dark pool" facility, Baikal, and investing significantly in its core trading platform, TradeElect.

The team developing Baikal is already in place and the platform is due for launch this summer. However, LSE is currently hiring for a few tech positions around its core trading platform, including senior trading systems developer, IT audit consultant, development architect and technical project manager.

The LSE currently offers trading at 3.7 milliseconds, which is slower than a lot of its new rivals. David Lester, director of information and technology services at LSE said at the firms interim financial statement presentation that it is looking at developing or buying in technology to reduce it to "sub-1 millisecond".

But the job opportunities available at the LSE are only half the story, reckons Chris Pickles, head of investment banking and global accounts at BT Global Financial Services, and former co-chair of the MiFID working group.

"When you make s radical change to the core technology within the trading system of an exchange, there's an added burden on the members to implement it. They'd need to adapt their software accordingly, which would add extra work and you would have thought job opportunities."