By Tatiana Bautzer, Saeed Azhar and Isla Binnie
NEW YORK (Reuters) -Wall Street banks have hired dozens of senior executives in recent months, as improved economic sentiment has spurred mergers and IPOs after a lull earlier in the year due to concerns over the effect of U.S. tariffs.
The surge in job-hopping, which typically occurs in the spring, illustrates how rising confidence has prompted banks to staff up to handle a wave of dealmaking.
“It’s been an active summer in investment banking,” said Troy Rohrbaugh, co-CEO of JPMorgan’s commercial and investment bank. “But we’ve also been strategically hiring for the long-term in sectors and geographies where we think we can continue to grow share.”
On Friday, JPMorgan named industry veteran Jerry Lee as global chair of investment banking who will be joining from rival Goldman Sachs. The bank has recently added several senior bankers in technology, energy and activism defense and hired more than 300 bankers between January and April across its global banking unit.
“Just at the moment when hiring was really supposed to kick off, strong tariff uncertainty really shook the markets and shook a lot of these banks, and therefore they said ‘Hey, let’s hold off’,” said Meridith Dennes, managing partner at financial search firm Prospect Rock Partners. “As the markets stabilized, hiring started to pick up in July.”
Wall Street executives usually receive and consider job offers between January and April, weeks after receiving their yearly bonuses. But the 2025 hiring season was interrupted by the announcement of U.S. tariffs that President Donald Trump called “Liberation Day.”
Talks for M&A and capital markets transactions froze. “The tariffs put a hard stop on hiring and banks started to downsize,” said Alan Johnson, founder of compensation consultancy Johnson Associates.
In June, as investment banking activity resumed, job openings that were on hold materialized, according to bankers and recruiters.
“There’s been no let up,” Julian Bell, head of Americas at executive search firm Sheffield Haworth. “We’ve been offering and closing on people all year without a pause and we’re still hard at it… it’s active across the market.”
Among the recent senior hires were Citigroup’s new co-heads of M&A, Guillermo Baygual and Drago Rajkovic, as well as Pankaj Goel, co-head for technology investment banking who all came from JPMorgan, hired by Citi’s head of banking Viswas Raghavan. Elsewhere, UBS added Taylor Henricks as its head of M&A in the Americas alongside a raft of other additions.
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