It's actually much broader than just flash trading, essentially you can divide it by which part of the bank it occurs in. Any front office tech (risk management

It's actually much broader than just flash trading, essentially you can divide it by which part of the bank it occurs in. Any front office tech (risk management, pricing, analytics, trading) app tends to be on the competitive edge as does anything it relies upon (infrastructure, feeds, tick databases, etc.) Back-office technology (settlement, reconciliation, etc.) tends to move much slower. It also depends on the asset class, more stagnant areas such a mortgages tend to have more stagnant codebases than "hot" areas like FX. Competitive areas aren't the same across all firms either, while one firm might put a lot of money into it analytics technology another might ignore that area altogether and just buy in an off-the-shelf solution accepting that it's not going to compete in that area. Essentially the only way you'll know about the quality of the tech you'll be working with is to be smart and ask questions at the interview stage (this is true for any firm).