Middle office functions are closely connected with the front office, but concerned with monitoring, and providing information on, the front office functions, rather than with the actual origination of transactions.
Examples of middle office functions are risk management and product control. The latter involves fine grained and frequent compilation of information on trading and similar activities.
The positions related to risk can require a high level of skills in financial mathematics, as it is necessary for the middle office to calculate complex measures such as value-at-risk.