Banking, investment and insurance : Typical employers

Typical employers include retail banks, investment banks and insurance companies. Supermarket chains are emerging as major employers as they now offer financial services and products. The numbers of graduates recruited varies from a handful to hundreds, depending on the size of the firm and its position in the market.

Once employed, you may need to take a professional qualification. The choice of professional institute will depend upon your area of specialisation, for example the British Bankers Association (BBA)  or the Chartered Insurance Institute (CII) .

Big players

Retail banking

• Employers include UK clearing banks, building societies, foreign banks with a UK branch network and finance houses.
• Big players include Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group (including Lloyds TSB, Halifax and Bank of Scotland), Nationwide and The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
• Typically employers can offer up to 30 positions on graduate schemes annually, depending on the size of the company.

Investment banking

• Big players include Barclays Capital, Bank of America, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, Houlihan Lokey and Morgan Stanley.
• There are also universal banks that deal in both investment and commercial banking. These include Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and UBS.
• Typically employers can offer up to 30 positions on graduate schemes annually, depending on the size of the company.

Private banking

• There are fewer opportunities given that this is a smaller sector.
• Investment and universal banks, such as J.P. Morgan and UBS, usually have a private banking stream.
• Key players include Barclays Wealth, Cater Allen (subsidiary of Santander), Coutts & Co (member and UK private banking arm of The Royal Bank of Scotland group), Rathbones and Investec Wealth & Investment.

Insurance companies

• Typical employers are Allianz Insurance, Aviva, AXA Insurance, Lloyd's of London and RSA.
• There are smaller insurance brokers or actuarial consultants that also offer graduate positions.
• Due to the expansion of the insurance industry companies require more graduates than before and there is a great variety of positions available.
• Numbers of graduate vacancies available per company can vary widely but are usually between five and ten annually. 

Small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs)

SMEs are organisations with fewer than 250 employees and an annual turnover of no more than £44million. Working for a smaller company can be rewarding because you are more likely to forge a path for yourself within the company, although opportunities to try other departments may be limited.

SMEs are unlikely to use the testing and assessment techniques of larger companies or follow lengthy recruitment procedures. SMEs are more likely to advertise their vacancies through the local press, university careers service bulletins, local graduate vacancy listings, jobcentres and word of mouth, rather than rely on their reputation and a presence at graduate recruitment fairs.

Your university careers service should have listings of jobs with small firms. See also the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) .

At the beginning of 2010 there were 76,000 SMEs in the financial and insurance sector, making up 24.6% of SME employment altogether (BIS, 2011).

SMEs in the banking, investment and insurance industry usually specialise in a particular area of work, e.g. credit derivatives, and they usually do not have structured graduate programmes. Competition for jobs is strong at the moment as SMEs recover from the recession. 

Self-employment

Although self-employment is not particularly common in the industry, there has been an increase as a result of redundancies and restructuring. However, self-employment in the financial services industry remains a lot lower than in the wider economy.

Self-employment usually involves working as an independent financial adviser or a consultant on short-term contracts, for example in IT or change management.

Find out more about self-employment.