I remain incredibly optimistic for the prospects of the City. Through 2020, the financial services sector has just gone from strength to strength. One of the common reasons I’m given for why people wanted a City career is that they wanted to work with intelligent, innovative, and driven people. All of these qualities have been demonstrated by financial service firms this year and, in many cases, they’ve found a way to do business and to have a record year. I think it will continue, as firms further innovate and develop their business models. The demand for talented people is as strong as I’ve ever seen it (and I’ve been recruiting since 2000). I think it’s always hard to predict themes for a year, but if I had to guess, I think firms will continue with their D&I programmes focusing on finding talent from more disadvantaged backgrounds, and digital transformation will continue from a sales & marketing perspective.

We were lucky at Fram not to have made any redundancies during the pandemic. This has paid dividends, and whilst we’ve lost some good people due to the great resignation, we’ve managed to hire some excellent people too. This has given us the bandwidth to service a much larger number of clients effectively and we’ve made real strides in the private equity and investment banking spaces. Our original wealth & asset management practice continues to thrive and we’re very keen to hire experienced Consultants, who can benefit from our outstanding platform.