City jobs have jumped 34pc but many hoped it’d be more. Here’s why
Jobs in the City grew by 25 per cent in February, compared to a year ago, according to recruitment firm Astbury Marsden.
The group found that 3,220 new jobs were created in London's financial district last month, following a strong January.
And more than that, 34 per cent more jobs have been created in the City over the past three months, when compared to a year earlier.
Mark Cameron, chief operating officer at Astbury Marsden, said the confident mood is underlined by the shrugging off of emerging market wobbles, with banks remaining upbeat about the long-term prospects for developed economies.
The FTSE 100’s recent 14 year high shows that investors’ appetite for risk has well and truly recovered.
IPO disappointment
But the firm also highlighted the £45bn of global Initial Public Offerings that are expected over the first part of this year – because although hiring’s ticked up across the City as a whole, an increase in equities by investment banks is “yet to materialise”.
Although the IPO market is heating up significantly, it hasn’t yet been quite the source of new jobs that a lot of people hoped it would be. A lot of investment banks already had underutilised people in this area, limiting the number of new hires needed.
Most of the new roles the IPOs have created, he said, have been outside the big investment banks – at brokerage houses, smaller banks, and NOMADs.
Astbury Marsden adeed, though, that there are some bright spots within Fixed Income, Currencies and Commodities, which have been relatively subdued when it comes to hiring. Cameron:
There has been a lot of investment in technology in recent years to ensure that front offices run more effectively. At present, there is a huge amount of work going on in applying what has been learned in long-established equities and derivatives algorithmic trading programmes to the FX market.
Banks are recruiting quite heavily to bring in staff who can hone their trading platforms to shave off those crucial thousandths of a second when executing trades, as well as design the algorithms needed to execute chosen trading strategies.