Financial industry as a whole is under a lot of stress right now. The jobs opps out there are shrinking...Banks talk about going lean, AKA layoffs. If you can't get into an investment bank, go for a tertiary opportunity. Try retail or some insurance company for a year or two.

You need Java or C++. Web/SOA/ and for some reason they all want multithreading experience, even though 80% of the work is server side. Familiarize yourself with the Java Concurrency package.