"If you work in London banking and you have 15 years+ experience, beware"

I have two decades' experience working in senior roles in London banks. I was let go earlier this year, a victim of both juniorisation and of near-shoring.

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At one point, the team I ran in London grew to over 100 people. In recent years, however, there was a push to near-shore as many roles as possible. Like most banks, the bank I worked for was cutting costs. It opened a near-shoring office and started hiring people there on salaries 50% lower than those in London. Managers like me were expected to nominate jobs that could be cut in London and shifted to the new office; the more jobs you nominated, the more favourably you were viewed. 

At the same time, there was a push to replace senior people with lower cost junior talent. Anyone with more than 15 years experience has been pushed out and replaced by people who are much cheaper. 

The upshot is that the bank has lost swathes of its most experienced people and is now far more reliant on people hired from university, given a few months' training, and expected to do complicated jobs. A huge amount of institutional knowledge has been lost in the past five years. I fear that this will only really become apparent in the next crisis.

Nathan Laurent is a pseudonym

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