“London ECM banking headcount risks falling 70%. Careers are over”
London equity capital markets (ECM) bankers are on a precipice. Unless something changes, jobs are going to be cut heavily next year. The market will force rationalisation whether firms want it or not.
Initial Public Offerings in London have been almost non-existent in 2025. If the pipeline disappoints again in 2026, London will become a derivative market doing secondary listings and follow-ons. In this case, ECM headcount will drop 60-70%, with only skeleton crews remaining at top three US banks.
Career paths effectively end, and you're looking at a 10-year rebuilding process. For many people, careers are now over.
We’ve seen this happen elsewhere. Look at Hong Kong ECM teams after the China tech crackdown in 2021-2022. Banks went from 30-person teams to 10-person teams within 18 months. The talent scattered to Singapore, New York, or left finance entirely.
The uncomfortable truth is that London's ECM job market is already in contraction. The question is whether it's a two-year correction or a decade-long structural decline.
For advisory-focused boutiques (Lazard, Rothschild, Evercore) this risks being especially brutal. They have senior-heavy ECM teams compared to bulge brackets. If they’re lucky, people in these teams will get absorbed into broader M&A practices, focusing on sell-side mandates with equity financing components.
I suspect that no one will announce "ECM layoffs" (bad optics). Instead, they will use attrition, internal transfers, and performance management to shrink teams in the next 12–18 months. Maybe ECM, M&A, and Leveraged Finance teams will merge into integrated "Corporate Finance" groups. ECM will become a sub-specialty rather than a standalone department.
The impact will be felt beyond ECM itself. There’s a broad ecosystem that supports London’s ECM bankers. Investor relations and shareholder services businesses will also suffer. Pure-play IR firms are at particular risk. Financial printing and design firms will disappear. Market intelligence and data providers are already being squeezed and are consolidating. Proxy solicitation and governance advisory firms might be resilient in the short term because they serve existing listed companies, but their client base is being eroded through a slow burn.
The longer this goes on, the more the sophistication of the London market will decline. Smart people will move to the US. Skills in London will atrophy as people with cutting edge IPO experience disappear. Knowledge transfer will break down because junior staff won’t have anyone to learn from as they’re not working on live transactions.
There will be nothing interesting going on in London.
One day things might change. But as per Hong Kong example, when the market eventually recovers, London will face a skills shortage that hampers its ability to compete for listings—creating yet another disadvantage vs. New York and other markets that maintained their ecosystems.
This might be a warning not to cut too hard. In Hong Kong, firms found they couldn't staff deals properly. They lost mandates to competitors who'd maintained platforms during the slump.
Kenneth Brewer is the pseudonym of a London MD in ECM
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