A FINANCIAL services company that provides software tools to help mitigate investment risks is struggling to find the people to help grow the business.

Fincad, a Canadian company headquartered in Vancouver, has grown its Dublin office from 10 to 15 staff in the last two months, but further expansion is hampered by an absence of maths and science postgraduates with the right experience.

“We have been actively recruiting sales and marketing people but positions for quantitative analysts are proving hard to fill,” says Gary Nolan, sales director.

Through service partners in Britain and mainland Europe it has a healthy supply of quantitative analysts, but it naturally wants its own people for the Irish office.

The company is launching a new product that calls for on-the-ground software skills and has spent the last two months scouring the jobs market for PhDs with practical quantitative analysis experience.

Nolan says he has so far seen around eight candidates but is still to fill the positions

Fincad opened its Dublin office in 2007 when corporation tax, a rich talent pool of prospective employees and a buoyant financial services sector were a compelling proposition for a company that was looking to establish an outpost to cover Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

“It was before the crisis kicked in. It is our target market, the financial institutions that have been hardest hit,” said Nolan.

He remains optimistic, however, and the company has an ambitious growth strategy based around its latest software. The product, F3, can calculate sophisticated analytics across a diverse portfolio of investments on a basic spreadsheet but requires complex integration skills that need to be deployed and run locally by people on the ground.

“We now need a software development presence in Ireland, not just sales and marketing, says Nolan. “It will have an impact on our growth plans if we can’t fill these roles. We would still have to service our EMEA customer base from Vancouver. Given the different time zones, that is not ideal.”

Fincad’s experience is the latest manifestation of a growing problem that is widely recognised in the Irish tech sector, where many companies are struggling to fill positions.

With only 16 per cent of Leaving Cert students opting to take maths at higher level, lower than other European countries, and a drop in the number of students taking science, a predicted skills shortfall is starting to bite.