Financial services job market index – May 2025

Financial services job market index – May 2025

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Executive Summary

There is no silver bullet when it comes to measuring demand in the U.K. financial services job market.

Over the years we have looked at everything from indices from recruitment agencies, aggregated job board data as well as government/ONS data. All of them are useful indicators but fail to offer an accurate reflection of what’s happening across Financial Services as well as individual and significant sub-sectors.

The City Career LAB & Rialto job market index captures data directly from corporate careers sites as a way of measuring jobs activity – specifically demand. It’s not perfect, but is perhaps the most accurate indicator of hiring demand in the U.K. financial services jobs market.

Each month we collect and analyse data from a broad and diverse basket of handpicked employers that represent a particular sub-sector of Financial Services in the U.K. These results which include all permanent and fixed term contract positions across all functions of the chosen organisations will be published on our website and LinkedIn – to show and explain the direction of the hiring market(s) from month to month.

Our observations this month include:

• This represents another very disappointing set of results on the back of unexpected drop off in April at a time of the year when hiring is usually growing not shrinking. Macro-economic uncertainty would appear to be the guilty party.
• Notably, there was a significant drop off in demand this month for Banking & Markets (-10%) and Investment Management (-19%).
• However, these negative results were almost (but not quite) offset by significant rises in other areas such as Fintech (+10%), Insurance (+8%) and Information Services (+6%)
• In terms of Year-on-Year results – the overall index is 3% up versus this time last year – which has narrowed further from 11% last month.

As a reminder – the Job Market Index is intended to be the most accurate read on hiring demand in the UK financial services sector.

The indicators show:

Banking & Markets: Corporate & Investment Banking, Markets, Securities Services (excl. Consumer/retail) -10%
Investment management: Asset Management, Alternatives -19%
Insurance: General, Life, Reinsurance, Broking +8%
Wealth & Private Banking: -1%
Fintech: Banking, Lending, Payments, Insurtech, Crowdfunding +10%
Information Services: Data Providers, Ratings Agencies, Risk +6%