Please don't go

Recruiters say banks are imposing longer notice periods on mid-ranking IT and accounting staff.

"A lot of people at vice president (VP) level are being asked to renew their contracts with a three month notice period," says Andrew Thomas of recruitment firm Thomas Keene Associates. "This is especially the case for technical people, programmers and operations staff."

Keene says the move is making it harder for IT staff to move into the contract market.

Emma Hall, head of banking at recruitment firm Finance Professionals, says a similar trend is afoot in accounting divisions, where banks are following in the footsteps of the Big Four, which increased notice periods to three months some time ago.

For anyone planning to quit soon, it's debatable whether notice periods make a real difference, however. Keene says they can be hard to impose: "Deutsche Bank put a lot of people on longer notice periods two years ago to keep people in their jobs for longer, but people still resigned and they were able to negotiate it down. Banks know the person is not going to put in as much effort as they would have done if they were staying."