Senior Moves in Wealth and Asset Management, Q1 2023

Overall hiring decreased across the board year-on-year, reflecting global economic uncertainty

TALNT is an AI-driven platform for tracking executive moves which gathers and analyses all publicly-announced senior moves sourced from 3000+ reputable public sources around the globe.

This inSights report reviews the biggest hiring trends within senior roles in Wealth and Asset Management globally. It will compare publicly available data totell the story of what’s going on a quarterly basis. What year-on-year trends will we see and how significant are they for the year ahead?

Senior level hiring tracks slightly 15 – 20% lower in Q1 2023 versus the same period last year

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

The charts above give a clear indication of the overall trend. Although visually it’s not all that easy to make out a clear direction of travel, from the available sources we see that overall senior hires in Wealth and Asset Management are down some 17% last quarter compared with the same period last year.

Taking a closer look at this from a regional perspective:

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

Every region experienced a decline, although it seems most dramatic in the Americas. Broadly, the mood in the market has been to hold off on major new strategic hires while they wait to see how the global economy will fare. Talking to key market stakeholders suggests that this attitude will prevail until Q3 or Q4. Although Q1 2023 saw a resilience against recession, high inflation and high interest rates remain a problem.

There are also those in the industry who think that 2021 and much of 2022 saw Wealth and Asset Managers over-hire in a rush of economic optimism, leading to correctional layoffs from late 2022 into the first months of this year.

Let’s take a deeper dive into the trends by sub-sector:

Q1 2023:

Q2 2022:

This chart shows clearly that Wealth Management, Asset Management, and Private Equity remain the sub-sectors with the most senior hires – though theses charts are perhaps the clearest so far when it comes to showing the relative decline in numbers between Q1 2022 and Q1 2023.

Of the sub-sectors, Wealth Management seems to show the most variance, with several peaks and troughs throughout the last quarter. Both it and Asset Management appear the most robust, while Private Equity appears slightly harder hit by the rise in interest rates, as one might expect.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

The chart above shows the same information differently. This time, although we can clearly see a decline in numbers across the board, the sharper drops in PE and Fund Management are more apparent in this format. Wealth Management looks the most robust of the sub-sectors.

This pie chart confirms that Wealth Management overtook Fund Management in Q1 2023 for the number of senior hires.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

The above chart breaks down the sub-sectors by region. Again, we can clearly see the dominance of the America region in all sub-sectors in Q1 2022 except for Public Funds and Fund Management. This percentage chart shows clearly that the decline senior hiring is also a decline in hiring the Americas region. As senior hiring has declined year-on-year in that region, this is what is chiefly responsible for bringing down the global total.

Most popular senior roles in Q1 2023

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

These charts show a marked difference in the most popular roles hired for in Q1 2023 and Q1 2022. 2022 shows a large bias towards the hiring of Managing Directors, which does perhaps suggest an over hiring in 2022 on feelings of optimism about the global economy coming out of Covid. 2023’s most popular roles by contrast, were Directors and CEOs, with very few partners. This pattern backs up the argument that we’ve been seeing more replacement and essential hires this year compared with more strategic hires in 2022 that were based around plans for growth.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

Taking a deeper diver into the regional breakdown of these most popular roles shows some interesting differences. For example, hiring CEOs remained as unpopular in the Americans region in Q1 2023 as it was in Q1 2022, despite CEO hires rising in EMEA and APAC.

Typically, the most popular roles are those that are most hired for in the US market. This broadly holds true for Q1 2023, but we can again see that the overall decline is due largely to a let up in hiring in that market, hence why roles such as CEO and Portfolio Manager have ranked higher than they otherwise would.

Q1 2023:

Q1 2022:

Looking at the top 10 companies in the sector who have made the most senior hires, we can see a real change year-on-year, with UBS way up at the top of the rankings this year after only making the number six spot in 2022.  There is no clear trend here, and the numbers themselves are very similar in both quarters.