Thousands of 55-year-old bankers are ready to retire. That's a problem

If you’re a banker in your 50’s, you might have a financial responsibility to not retire yet. You might also, however, have a societal one.

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The UK's Financial Services Skills Commission (FSSC) believes that 260,000 “highly-skilled” workers will depart the financial services sector from a combination of retirement and attrition by 2035. That might not seem like huge problem – 2035 is a long way away, after all, and the sector recruits more than enough students, right? Right? 

Wrong, actually.

According to the High Fliers 2024 graduate market report, financial services (defined as a combination of the “accounting & professional services”, “banking & finance”, and “investment banking” categories) hired a total of 10,068 graduates over the course of 2023.

That’s a slight decline on 2022, but not an extremely significant one in the grand scheme of things. Extrapolating the numbers suggests around 100,000 graduates will be hired in the UK between now and 2035, while 260,000 people retire. That’s a disparity of 150,000 people.

Some banks might be more affected than others. - Deutsche Bank, for example. 2023 accounts for the bank’s London-based subsidiary, DB Group Services (UK) Limited, showed that it's been hiring more senior bankers (managing directors specifically) than before, while the proportional number of junior roles, analysts specifically, dwindled.

Keeping those more senior faces has more than a few advantages, however. 15 years of experience can’t be replaced by the best graduate training program in the world, no matter how much words like “upskilling” enter the lexicon of LinkedIn influencers. And as one banker told us, the risks of near-shoring and juniorization to save on department budgets “will only really become apparent in the next crisis.”

Old age hath yet his honour and his toil, apparently. 

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