The European bank with the surprisingly big hiring plans

If you're looking for a new banking job in either London or New York right now, it seems one bank is hiring far more than any other. And it's not the bank you might expect.

It's UBS, the Swiss bank which has also been making (modest) cuts to its global equities business. 

UBS's comparative enthusiasm for recruiting is shown in the chart below. Across both London and New York it currently has 252 permanent job vacancies posted on its own website. Deutsche Bank and Barclays, by comparison, have just 70. BNP Paribas has an even more diminutive 36.

It's not just UBS: rival Swiss bank Credit Suisse is also hiring comparatively robustly as we go into the fourth quarter.

Reduced hiring at Deutsche Bank, Barclays, BNP Paribas and SocGen comes as these banks focus heavily on cutting costs. Last month, Deutsche Bank CEO Christian Sewing began insisting that all hires must be 'critical' and that all new recruits must be signed-off by either himself, his CFO James von Moltke, or his deputy CFO Karl von Rohr. Barclays, meanwhile, is rumoured to have a 'freeze' on hiring, although this is heavily denied by the bank. And both BNP Paribas and SocGen have been engaged in redundancy plans, with SocGen's voluntary redundancy programme in process at this very moment.

Vacancy numbers shown in the chart are for all business areas. UBS's investment bank added 555 people in the year to June 2019, an increase of 12%. Nearly 30% of UBS's current London vacancies across all business areas are in technology. In New York, a similar proportion are in wealth management.

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