You're not going to do functional (or any other interesting) programming as an IT programmer in a generic financial services company.
If you work for an actual software company (or perhaps an innovative financial services company) as a software engineer (or even on an operations team in some cases e.g., Sysadmins at Google using Haskell, ops tools at Yahoo once built in OCaml), there's plenty of chances to do functional programming (or something else that interests you).
It's just generally people are programmed to think "it's just a job" and choose their jobs based on salary, name recognition, commute hours etc... (Some also have very specialized skills like systems programming or machine learning and aren't particularly interested in programming languages, although I think they're missing out)
Comments
You're not going to do functional (or any other interesting) programming as an IT programmer in a generic financial services company.
If you work for an actual software company (or perhaps an innovative financial services company) as a software engineer (or even on an operations team in some cases e.g., Sysadmins at Google using Haskell, ops tools at Yahoo once built in OCaml), there's plenty of chances to do functional programming (or something else that interests you).
It's just generally people are programmed to think "it's just a job" and choose their jobs based on salary, name recognition, commute hours etc... (Some also have very specialized skills like systems programming or machine learning and aren't particularly interested in programming languages, although I think they're missing out)