Robert Walters, the compliance recruitment firm, has just published its global survey of trends concerning recruitment and salaries in 2016.

Compliance skills were among the four most sought-after skill-sets on the jobs market in 2016, according to the global agency, the others being legal skills, 'digital' (presumably IT) skills and project management. Shared service centres were a major source of hiring in the home counties of the UK and in the provinces, especially in the North West and Midlands. The low value of the Pound Sterling helped exporters and encouraged foreign investment, in contrast with the assertions of anti-Brexit naysayers.

Despite uncertainty in the first half of 2016 in the run-up to the referendum in which the British people decided to leave the European Union, that governmental club's market abuse regime and impending updates to its Markets in Financial Instruments Directive compelled employers to appoint new compliance workers. In doing so, they favoured specialists over generalists, particularly in the field of financial crime, with junior-to-mid-level people accounting for the bulk of hiring, leading to a shortage of suitable candidates and an increase in salaries at this level.

Robert Walters expects salaries to grow most steeply in front-line advisory jobs on trading floors, especially among junior and mid-level "professionals," as it calls them, although its reasons for predicting a preference among employers for low-level compliance people who coincidentally happen to be doctors or architects remains obscure. The firm also expects employers in financial services to become more open to candidates from non-traditional backgrounds such as asset management, hedge funds and insurance.

Legal recruitment activity increased in financial services in 2016, with MIFID, margin reform and repapering for uncleared over-the-counter derivatives motivating financial firms to increase their legal headcounts this year.

In an enigmatic table of basic salaries in London that may or may not be at banks and may or may not represent averages, Robert Walters says that 'central compliance' people with more than 6 years’ experience can expect to earn £115,000 upwards in 2017 - an advance of £15,000 on last year. For contract work the rate remains the same, at £700 a day. The salary figures remain the same for both years for people with 4-6 years' experience (£75-90,000); 2-4 years' experience (£60-75,000); and 0-2 years' experience (£40-55,000). Daily contract rates for these people have declined drastically.