You will find that MS Access is used widely in banks and trading companies. They use it because it is a great tool, along with Excel for modelling and reporting data sets from a wide range of sources such as SAP, Endur, Reuters, Bloomberg, Oracle, SQL Server and so on. Up-to Access 2010 Microsoft had a great feature where you could remove the Jet database engine and replace it with SQL Server (this was called Microsoft Access Project). This would provide you with the enterprise features, security and scalability, of SQL Server with forms and reports built in. I use this feature a lot. My current project at a global trading firm is for a price risk tool that is used globally with 200+ users, hundreds of millions of records and is used to make mulit-million dollar decisions. The forms and reports editor in Access is still a league ahead of the clunky tools available in .NET for desktop applications, although Access does lack all the fancy 3rd party add-in's you can get for .NET. Unfortunately Microsoft has neglected the tool over the years and the last good version of the tool was MS Access 2010. I know VBA gets a bad rap as a programming language as there are a lot of bad Access databases out there but it is actually quite powerful when used correctly. You can write bad applications in any language - i have seen enough poorly written C# applications over the years. Also the best thing about MS Access development is the pay - it is at least 50-100% higher then the top rated day rates you can get with any other programming tool available. You do need to have a trading background though to understand the models - it is that knowledge you are getting paid for, rather then your skill with VBA