City employers appear to be holding their nerve and not scaling back sharply on recruitment in the light of the credit crunch and feared job losses, according to the body that sets exams for the financial services industry.

Figures this week from the Securities & Investment Institute (SII), seen by The Times, suggest that there has been no fall-off in the graduate recruitment pipeline. City professionals across a wide range of jobs such as analysis, banking and fund management need qualifications from courses set by the SII, which is the main awarding body for financial services, and their numbers are a clear indicator of employment trends.

This week’s statistics suggest only a slight fall in graduate recruitment, which across the top 20 investment banks is running at 94 per cent of the 2007 level. There is little difference between the take-up levels of US and nonUS banks, down 4 per cent and 8 per cent respectively.

Although lower, this year’s figure is a retreat from the sharp 20 per cent rise seen between 2006 and 2007. The figures are gathered annually from firms entering their graduates for SII exams.

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Simon Culhane, the SII chief executive, said that the City was holding its collective nerve, by contrast with earlier market downturns, such as in 2003 to 2004, when institutions retrenched severely and then found themselves short of trained staff when the market picked up.

“In 2003 and 2004 they cut everything and ran away,” he said. “This is encouraging news as it demonstrates that banks are looking to the longer term. They really have kept pretty much to their expansion plans. They are keeping the pipeline open.”

The only discernible trend, which he said came as a surprise, was an apparent increase in recruitment by firms working in the traditional City, offset by a reduction at Canary Wharf.

“It’s much more positive than I would have expected. I would have thought that you would have seen a much deeper cut.”

The latest figures are published just days after the Bank of England apparently called the bottom of the current crisis. They will be seen as a positive counterbalance to gloomy predictions of widespread job cuts in banking.

Last month the Centre for Economics and Business Research claimed the City was facing the worst employment downturn since the bursting of the dot-com bubble, with up to 20,000 jobs to be lost over the next two years, 11,000 of them going this year, and no recovery until 2012.

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