“The landscape of financial services has changed due to the credit crisis and government uncertainty,” said Jeanne Branthover, leader of the firm’s global financial services practice and managing director of Boyden New York.

However, there are rays of light: companies will continue to invest in wealth management, asset management, risk and compliance and technology, the firm predicts.

On the other hand, “many are eliminating entire functions or departments such as M&A, investment banking and proprietary trading to clean up and deliver their balance sheets,” said Branthover. “Major institutions will look leaner in hopes of becoming more nimble and opportunistic."

Wealth management singled out for growth

A number of institutions have already announced heavy job cuts, with the investment banking side disproportionately hit - and wealth management singled out in a few cases for growth.

Citigroup is to cut 4,500 jobs, which would represent about 1.7 per cent of its total workforce when based on 30 September figures. HSBC, meanwhile, announced last year it was slashing a total of 30,000 jobs, equal to a tenth of the workforce.

UBS will shed around 3,500 jobs, of which 45 per cent will come from the wealth management side of its business - including the Americas - as it moves to deliver on a SFr2. 0 billion reduction in expenses. However, the Swiss bank will reduce its risk-weighted assets in investment banking by around 50 per cent to SFr145 billion, from a SFr300 billion level, in a move to cut risk and focus more on its wealth management operations.

Credit Suisse previously announced a goal to increase private banking's contribution to the group's pre-tax income by SFr800 million by 2014. Barclays, meanwhile, has singled out its wealth management business, Barclays Wealth, for growth during this year and is one of the two areas where shareholders will see expansion, the firm’s chief executive said recently.

Asia-Pacific, China: “hiring has slowed down”

Looking further afield, in the financial services sector in Asia-Pacific – where talent management has notoriously been a challenge for wealth management firms in recent years – hiring has slowed down.

“Companies are awarding increasingly smaller salary increments as the overall job market moves from being candidate-sparse to an employer-sparse one,” said Gina Ong, partner of Boyden Singapore.

There are also redundancies being seen in almost every sector of the industry in China.

“There is little activity in the financial sector, a marked contrast from what we were seeing a year or even six months ago,” said Brian Renwick, managing director of Boyden China. “That said, most Chinese businesses are still fairly confident that growth will continue and many European and US firms continue to invest for China’s long-term future.”