London banking jobs appear to have fallen 80% in the past decade

If you're looking for a banking job in London, and you're struggling to find one, recruitment firm Morgan McKinley can tell you why. The London financial job services jobs market is not itself. It is a shrivelled husk.

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The chart below, based on Morgan McKinley's data, reflects the situation. London financial services jobs were up the tiniest amount in the first quarter of 2025, but given the low baseline the increase is immaterial.  

Morgan McKinley's contemporary figures are, however, only part of the story. The recruitment firm has been issuing its estimates of market size, based on an extrapolation of its own job numbers, for at least a decade. And in the pre-pandemic past, its numbers were indicative of a glorious time of forgotten plenty. 

In the first quarters of 2016 and 2017, for example, Morgan McKinley thought there were over 8,000 new jobs coming to the market a month in the City of London. In 2014, it thought there were 8,500 new jobs in the market in June alone. In 2013, it spied a mere 7,000 a month and bad times were called.

Unless Morgan McKinley quietly changed its methodology (conceivable), the implication is that London financial services job market has shrunk by 80% in the past decade. Once, Morgan McKinley thought there were 8,000 jobs coming to the market every month. Now, it thinks there are 1,600. 

Even if Morgan McKinley's new quarterly figures are equated to its previous monthly figures, something serious has happened. And even if you simply look at the past five years, the market is bumping along to a bad baseline.

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