Fewer jobs and more unemployment in the Swiss banking sector

Dwindling job opportunities and more unemployed in the banking sector Keystone-SDA

The largest Swiss banks have advertised few jobs, while the number of unemployed people who previously worked in the banking sector is rising sharply.

The 10 largest Swiss banks currently have 505 job advertisements on their websites. Compared to the end of November, this represents an additional nine job offers, as a current analysis by the job portal Indeed shows. However, the fact that the number of job advertisements is 2% than the previous month does not change the difficult situation for bankers on the labour market.

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A year ago, Indeed, which regularly analyses job vacancies at the largest Swiss banks for the news agency AWP, counted over 570 advertised positions. Two years ago, there were even over 900 job advertisements.

The tight labour market is particularly evident at UBS, which is reducing the number of jobs considerably as part of the integration of Credit Suisse: the number of vacancies on the big bank’s website has halved within a year.

More unemployed bankers

At the same time as the number of vacancies is falling, the number of registered unemployed workers is rising. In the canton of Zurich, for example, 1,300 people from the banking sector were registered as unemployed in November. This is 20% more than a year earlier, according to the latest figures from the cantonal employment office.

Across Switzerland, 3,975 people registered as unemployed had previously worked at a bank in November, as the figures from the State Secretariat for Economic Affairs (Seco) show. Compared to November 2024, this represents an increase of 18%, and compared to November 2023, an increase of almost 50%. At 3.1%, the unemployment rate in the banking sector is also higher than the overall unemployment rate, which currently stands at 2.9%.

This number of unemployed bank employees is expected to rise further in the coming months. The transfer of Credit Suisse’s client relationships to UBS should be completed in the near future. Many of the integration teams will then probably no longer be needed, which is likely to lead to many redundancies at UBS. Group CEO Sergio Ermotti announced shortly after the Credit Suisse takeover that around 3,000 jobs would be lost in Switzerland by the end of 2026 as part of the integration.

Adapted from German by DeepL/ac

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