The work these bankers were doing is not necessarily going away, though. Instead, jobs are popping up in places like India and Eastern Europe, often where healthier local markets exist.

In addition to moving some lower-level banking and research positions to support bankers and analysts in New York and London, firms are shipping some of their top bankers from those cities to faster-growing developing markets to handle clients there.

Owing in part to credit weaknesses and billion-dollar charges from the subprime crisis, “people who were off-shoring high value jobs are increasing the intensity of that, and people who were not are now in the planning stage,” said Andrew Power, a financial services partner at Deloitte Consulting.

Wall Street banks started cautiously sending research jobs to India a few years ago, hiring employees by the handful and running pilot programs with firms like Copal, Office Tiger, Pipal Research and Tata Consultancy Services.

In 2003, JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley said they planned to move a few dozen research jobs to Mumbai, Lehman Brothers was working on a pilot program to create research presentations in India and both Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs said they had not moved any research to the country.

Five years later, the trickle is a flood. Third-party firms say they are seeing a 20 to 40 per cent upswing in business this year alone.