At the risk of appearing like a Goldman Sachs fanzine, we’d like to draw your attention to the fact its technology division has just received a glowing review for its innovations this year. Within this, though, the firm reveals its investment plans (and hence potential job opportunities) for 2010.

Wall Street & Technology has produced a (rather gushing) article on Goldman’s ‘gold standard’ of IT innovation. Stripping away the talk of a ‘culture of collaboration’ and ‘ingrained risk management’, there are some interesting insights into the firm’s plans for next year.

Currently, it’s engaged in reducing the latency of its order management, routing and exchange connectivity, while the focus for 2010 will be developing multi-asset class trading systems.

Joseph Squeri, global head of equities technology at Goldman, said: “We’re building automated trading engines for our in-house traders as well as our external client trading systems because we feel the biggest innovation we’ll get over the next 12 months will be the ability to move toward more electronic trading across multiple asset classes.”

While it’s always good to see ambitious projects being rolled out in difficult times, this is not necessarily going to lead to a raft of recruitment at the firm.

In 2009, tech budgets at Goldman so far are largely in line with last year (when they ramped up spending on 2007). However, headhunters tell us that the bank has still been relatively conservative in its recruitment activity.

“They don’t make large numbers of senior hires but have a very strong pipeline of internal candidates who they prefer to manoeuvre into senior roles where appropriate,” says one financial IT executive search firm. “Goldman Sachs tend not to hire in big bursts but make slow, methodical additions in line with long terms plans.”

Still, the plaudits being lumped on the firm don’t come as a surprise to another investment banking IT recruiter we spoke to.

“Once someone has taken the risk and tested the market for new product, they are quick to innovate and overtake competitors,” they said. “Even the top leadership team have remained very strong technologists, whilst at some other banks they become general managers who happen to run teams of technology people.”