With the downturn in financial services continuing to bite, an exodus of expatriate finance professionals from the City to their country of origin is creating opportunities for recruiters.

Robert Thesiger, chief executive of finance recruiter Imprint, parent of Morgan McKinley, told Recruiter: “The exodus of expatriate talent from the City is certainly affecting London’s financial services recruitment market. However, for international recruitment consultancies such as ours, the impact is reduced as we are able to help facilitate this candidate movement from London to regions such as the Middle East and Asia-Pacific, for example.”

Thesiger’s comments come as a survey by job board eFinancialCareers found that nearly one in three (29%) of finance professionals originally from overseas do not expect to be in the UK. Over half (58%) of these said they anticipated returning to their country of origin.