Economic slowdowns tend to make hiring more cautious, but in 2025 they’re also creating rare openings for financial services firms that know where to look. While inflation, market volatility, and geopolitical tension weigh on the industry, these forces are also reshaping the talent market in ways that favor decisive employers.
For banks and financial institutions, strategic workforce planning now can secure hard-to-find skills before competition intensifies in the next growth cycle. The firms investing in talent during uncertainty aren’t just protecting their capabilities. They’re building competitive advantages that will define their position in the market over the next decade.
Where Financial Services Firms Are Investing in Talent During Economic Uncertainty
Even in a cautious hiring climate, leading financial services firms are using this period to double down on roles and capabilities that will define their competitiveness over the next decade. Strategic investment is clustering in four interconnected areas: AI-driven capabilities, risk and compliance expertise, workforce upskilling, and cross-sector talent acquisition. Together, these moves reflect a shift from reactive hiring to building a more adaptive, future-ready workforce.
AI Skills Are Moving from Niche to Mainstream
In his April 2025 shareholder letter, Jamie Dimon underscores AI’s strategic centrality, linking competitiveness directly to national and corporate capabilities in AI and semiconductors. He’s blunt: staying ahead in the “AI race” is part of safeguarding economic strength. The letter also reiterates that JPMorgan continues to invest “in products, people and technology” even in choppy conditions: an explicit signal that capability building remains non-negotiable during uncertainty.
This June, Barclays announced one of the sector’s largest enterprise rollouts of Microsoft 365 Copilot—bringing AI assistance to 100,000 employees and integrating it into the bank’s own colleague productivity tools. This isn’t just a tech deployment; it’s a workforce strategy that changes day-to-day work for nearly the entire global staff and demands new skills in prompt design, model-aware risk controls, and change management.
Hong Kong’s AI push is shifting from small-scale trials to large-scale, regulated use. KPMG’s Hong Kong Banking Report 2025 points to the HKMA’s Generative AI Sandbox and its focus on “trusted AI” — making sure models can be explained, bias is managed, and boards take responsibility for oversight. For banks, that means bringing in data scientists and AI-risk experts, while also training existing teams to work confidently and responsibly with AI.
Talent Takeaway: AI is no longer a niche center of excellence; it’s becoming ambient. Banks are seeking engineers and data talent, but they’re also elevating AI-literate product leaders, risk specialists who understand models, and change leaders who can raise productivity without raising operational risk. Even where headcount growth is being resisted, it remains clear that strategic roles remain in demand, while AI enables re-allocation and upskilling elsewhere.
Risk, Compliance, and Cyber Talent Stay Non-Negotiable
The Bank of England’s Systemic Risk Survey (H1 2025) shows geopolitical risk and cyberattack remain the two most frequently cited threats to the UK financial system. Notably, respondents also highlight the rising probability of a high-impact event over the short and medium term versus 2024 H2. This backdrop puts sustained pressure on banks to deepen cyber, operational resilience, and scenario-planning skills.
In March 2025 reporting, Citi outlined plans to reduce reliance on IT contractors and hire thousands of employees to harden IT controls and data governance after regulatory penalties and incidents. Translation: even in cost-disciplined environments, firms will add permanent, accountable talent where control failures are expensive. It’s a concrete example of uncertainty pushing demand for data governance, tech risk, and engineering talent into the “must-invest” category.
Talent Takeaway: Economic uncertainty doesn’t lessen regulatory intensity, it raises the cost of getting it wrong. Cyber specialists, financial-crime technologists, model-risk professionals, and product-governance leaders are in structural demand. Forward-leaning firms are pairing these hires with automation (to deflect low-value workload) and robust training so that every function operates with a controls-first mindset.
Upskilling and Internal Mobility Strengthen Workforce Resilience
In 2025, HSBC opened its first global training center in Guangzhou—its largest anywhere—capable of training 14,000 employees annually. The focus: fintech capabilities, leadership development, and market insight.
Jamie Dimon’s 2025 letter again stresses continuous investment in people and tech as a driver of long-term outperformance. That mindset aligns with a more selective, scenario-based approach to headcount: keep building skills that compound and retrain where automation is likely to shrink roles.
Talent Takeaway: Leading firms operate as “learning organizations,” deliberately cultivating technical expertise alongside human strengths like adaptability, problem-solving, and creativity. These capabilities not only complement advancing technologies but also enable teams to pivot, innovate, and sustain performance as roles, tools, and market demands evolve.
Cross-Sector Hires Open New Capabilities
The most agile financial services firms are also looking beyond their own industry for talent. For example, high-profile layoffs in technology have released software engineers, product managers, and AI specialists into the market, but similar shifts are occurring in sectors such as energy, telecoms, and professional services. These industries produce talent skilled in data science, operational transformation, customer experience, and sustainability—capabilities that can accelerate innovation and improve service delivery in financial services.
Talent Takeaway: Cross-sector hiring brings in fresh perspectives and specialist expertise that can be difficult to develop in-house, giving financial services firms a faster route to innovation and market differentiation.
Why Hiring in Economic Uncertainty Can Be a Competitive Advantage
Periods of volatility may reduce competition for talent, as some firms freeze hiring. For those willing to act, the benefits include:
- Access to skilled professionals who might not have been available in a boom.
- The ability to shape a workforce around future needs rather than just immediate gaps.
- Greater leverage in negotiating compensation and benefits.
- Faster rebound potential when market conditions improve.
Six Talent Moves Winning in 2025
- Target “AI + X” profiles: Hybrid roles that combine AI literacy with product, risk, or operational expertise.
- Elevate AI governance: Formalizing AI oversight at board and executive level in response to regulatory expectations.
- Invest through the cycle: Trimming non-essential hiring but expanding in strategic, high-impact roles.
- Make learning continuous: Treating upskilling as core infrastructure, not a one-off initiative.
- Anchor to risk reality: Aligning talent strategy with the highest-priority systemic risks, from cyber to geopolitics.
In a year marked by macroeconomic ambiguity, from lingering inflation to geopolitical tensions, major financial services firms are not standing still with their talent strategies. Instead, they are leaning into the uncertainty and using it as a catalyst to innovate how they attract, develop, and deploy their people. Globally, financial institutions are selectively hiring in high-impact areas like technology, AI, and risk management, even as they rein in costs elsewhere. They are embracing a mix of external recruiting and internal upskilling: snapping up available talent while heavily investing in reskilling programs and career mobility to unlock the potential of current employees
The underlying theme is agility. Financial institutions know that the only constant is change, so a versatile workforce is the best defense against whatever comes next. Economic uncertainty may be a headwind, but with the right talent strategies, banks are turning it into an opportunity to strengthen their teams, weed out inefficiencies, and emerge more resilient.
About LevelUP
LevelUP helps financial services firms secure high-impact talent through targeted recruitment, RPO solutions, and workforce planning expertise. Our solutions prioritize the identification of essential skills, while our dedicated talent intelligence team continuously monitors in-demand skills and market trends to provide critical insights needed to stay ahead of the competition. Whether you’re building AI capabilities, deepening risk and compliance, or unlocking cross-sector skills, we’ll help you move decisively and stay ahead. Learn more about our services.
