Banking Sector Report April 2020 – FINANCE FOCUS

This year was already set to be tumultuous for people in finance, as the final negotiations of Brexit took shape. The fact that the UK is now outside of the single market reliant on equivalence clauses to allow services to be provided to EU countries, continues to cause concern. Despite this, many businesses had already been contingency planning for this outcome by migrating functions to other offices to mitigate against this.

This had already been acting as a drag on recruitment through 2019, with volumes down 8% on the previous year, namely in terms of Accounting and Financial Services. Similarly, by company, the impact of Brexit had not been uniform either, for example take the Big 4, EY had recorded explosive growth in Q1, whilst a number of other firms had scaled back recruitment. Similar disparities can be seen in both Banking and Insurance.