[NEW YORK] Wall Street banks have hired dozens of senior executives in recent months, as improved economic sentiment has spurred mergers and IPOs after a lull earlier in the year due to concerns over the effect of US tariffs.
The surge in job-hopping, which typically occurs in the spring, illustrates how rising confidence has prompted banks to staff up to handle a wave of dealmaking.
“It’s been an active summer in investment banking,” said Troy Rohrbaugh, co-CEO of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank. “But we’ve also been strategically hiring for the long-term in sectors and geographies where we think we can continue to grow share.”
On Friday (Aug 22), JPMorgan named industry veteran Jerry Lee as global chair of investment banking who will be joining from rival Goldman Sachs. The bank has recently added several senior bankers in technology, energy and activism defence and hired more than 300 bankers between January and April across its global banking unit.
“Just at the moment when hiring was really supposed to kick off, strong tariff uncertainty really shook the markets and shook a lot of these banks, and therefore they said ‘Hey, let’s hold off’,” said Meridith Dennes, managing partner at financial search firm Prospect Rock Partners. “As the markets stabilised, hiring started to pick up in July.”
Wall Street executives usually receive and consider job offers between January and April, weeks after receiving their yearly bonuses. But the 2025 hiring season was interrupted by the announcement of US tariffs that President Donald Trump called “Liberation Day.”
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Talks for M&A and capital markets transactions froze. “The tariffs put a hard stop on hiring and banks started to downsize,” said Alan Johnson, founder of compensation consultancy Johnson Associates.
In June, as investment banking activity resumed, job openings that were on hold materialized, according to bankers and recruiters.
“There’s been no let up,” Julian Bell, head of Americas at executive search firm Sheffield Haworth. “We’ve been offering and closing on people all year without a pause and we’re still hard at it… it’s active across the market.”
Among the recent senior hires were Citigroup’s new co-heads of M&A, Guillermo Baygual and Drago Rajkovic, as well as Pankaj Goel, co-head for technology investment banking who all came from JPMorgan, hired by Citi’s head of banking Viswas Raghavan. Elsewhere, UBS added Taylor Henricks as its head of M&A in the Americas alongside a raft of other additions.
Although recruitment improved after tariff-fuelled freezing, it is still below more active years in the last decade, said Alan Johnson, founder of compensation consultancy Johnson Associates.
While hiring for senior managing director positions has been steady, banks started hiring more junior staff in August, according to Tom Ragland, founder and CEO of financial services search firm the Harrison-Rush Group.
He reported a 200 per cent increase in inbound and unsolicited messages from investment banks wanting associates and vice-presidents – typically early-career positions in banks – in the week to Aug 13. This was a rebound from the first half of the year, when Ragland received 30 per cent fewer hiring mandates for junior roles than in the same period of 2024.
Boutique investment banks appear especially optimistic. Evercore announced late in July a deal to buy British boutique investment bank Robey Warshaw for US$196 million. Evercore will now have more than 400 bankers in nine countries in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Lazard has hired 14 managing directors in 2025 as a way to reach the goal of doubling revenue by 2030, it said in July. Other areas that have been actively hiring are wealth management and private credit, according to Johnson Associates. Investment banking revenue was tipped to rise 20 per cent this year before April, but that target is no longer achievable and banks are building up their teams for next year, Alan Johnson added.
The latest hiring decisions are backed by some deals getting closed, Dennes said.
“A lot of folks had talked about building up a huge pipeline in the fourth quarter of 2024, and then subsequently, it was really tough to execute deals due to market uncertainty in the first half of 2025,” she said. “If you don’t have any deals closed, you don’t have any money to hire people,” she said. REUTERS
