Whispers of 2026: What Lies Beneath the Surface

2025 was a strong year for financial services. Amid rapid transformation and shifting customer expectations, the sector gained 13,000 payrolled employees last year, according to ONS. It was the second biggest talent surge of any sector in the UK, and it shows that firms are entering the New Year alert, energised and primed to move fast.

The year ahead is going to test how organisations think, decide and lead. Hanover’s predictions cut straight to the heart of the trends that will matter most, and what they mean for companies who want to hit 2026 at full voltage. 

1. Boards will finally realise the most dangerous succession plan is “hope”

2026 must be the year companies stop gambling their future on the hope that a single leader can do it all. Every time a board hires a “hero,” they unknowingly build fragility into their organisation. They create dependence, not capability, and design a system where everything points back to one voice. Inevitably, when that voice disappears, the strategy collapses. 

And your hero will disappear. CEO tenures are shrinking year after year, which makes over-concentrating power around one individual riskier than ever. Heading into 2026, where rapid change will become the default condition, organisations must build collective capability across their entire leadership team. The question needs to move from “Who’s our next hero?” to “How do we build a system that doesn’t collapse when one person leaves?”

This all comes back to a key mindset that every firm needs to keep themselves anchored to this year: Succession is a discipline, not a contingency plan. If your board can’t instantly name three internal successors with real authority to lead, you simply won’t have the pipeline nor the bench strength to weather oncoming storms.

2. FS finally confronts the uncomfortable truth: They don’t have a technology problem, they have a usage problem

We’re supposed to be in a tech-enabled era, but nobody’s using tech. Financial services has spent billions on tech – $7.2 billion in the first half of 2025 alone, and 75% of FS firms claim to already be using AI-driven solutions. 

But walk the floors of most institutions and you’ll see the reality. Excel tabs open. Analysts rekeying data manually. Harry sitting in board meetings, scribbling away for three and a half hours. Leadership conversations relying on intuition rather than data-driven evidence. Firms have bought the future and then continued operating in the past, with many of their decision cycles looking identical to the way they operated five years ago. 

None of this points to the fabled “AI skills gap.” It’s a behaviour gap, an unwillingness to release the reigns of control and embrace technology as a lived behaviour. Intelligent algorithms will cement themselves as the lifeblood of FS this year, and boards will have no choice but to begin scrutinising adoption and challenging their leaders on whether the tools they’ve invested so heavily in are genuinely reshaping decision-making, or whether they simply exist as evidence of modernisation.

The firms that will accelerate ahead of the competition will be those whose leaders personally model technology usage, who make real-time decisions based on live data, not via three-week reporting cycles, and who encourage their teams to operate the same way. Surviving the digital age won’t be about owning tech, it will be about using it.

3. 2026 is the year boards stop hiring “history” and start hiring “systems thinkers”

For the last decade, executive search has been obsessed with what someone has done. In 2026, the obsession shifts to how someone thinks. 

Most boards still hire based on achievement archaeology: digging through history to prove a candidate once did something extraordinary. The assumption is that experience transfers linearly from one environment to another. But the current market exposes how shallow that thinking is. The conditions ahead require executives who can learn faster than context changes. The only leaders who thrive now are those who see organisations as living systems. Not as a set of functions or silos, but as interconnected levers of value.

This year’s most triumphant firms will hire the people who can create clarity in chaos, assemble the right information at speed, and build alignment across egos and agendas. Boards will start looking for evidence of cognitive range, not just pedigree. In tandem, search mandates will stop prioritising experience and titles, and start digging deeper into:

• How someone responds to ambiguity
• How they regulate emotion in high-stakes moments
• How quickly they zoom from detail to horizon
• How they integrate perspectives
• Whether they have the ability to re-architect a business 

A long track record of experience may show what someone has carried, but systems thinking reveals what someone can build. If your hiring strategy still prioritises tenure and titles above all else, you’ll wind up building a leadership team for yesterday.

4. Leadership language turns into an economic force

Culture takes on the tone of its leaders, and unfortunately, there are too many executives who continue to radiate depletion. In the past 12 months, pessimism has become the default tone in FS. Most conversations sound like:

“Everything’s a battle.”

“This quarter is brutal.”

“We’re just trying to survive.”

That language scripts behaviour. It packages the business as a burden to be managed rather than a vehicle to be shaped. It speaks in terms of constraint, it puts everybody’s backs up, and it spreads the belief that growth is always a grind. It’s no wonder why so much cultural oxygen is tinged in negativity, or why teams start thinking in limitations rather than possibility.

The leaders who are collapsing this mindset, and putting their organisations in better stead, are speaking with positivity and constructive convictions. They acknowledge challenge without feeding it. They create altitude for others. People leave their meetings feeling refreshed, reenergised, and more capable than they entered. Staying grounded in that forward-energy is magnetic: people want to follow them because they create belief.

In 2026, the most valuable leaders every board should be reaching for are those who can speak the language of possibility – because culture and performance don’t follow strategy; more than anything, they follow vocabulary and tone.

5. The era of the “placement partners” gives way to the era of the “strategic co-architect”

The road into 2026 is uneven, and boards will face conditions they’ve never navigated before. Hiring today is less about filling a vacancy and more about shaping the business decision behind it. Still, most executive search firms will continue operating like order-takers: “send us the job description and we’ll start the process.” These are not partners, they are merchants, driven by transactions, not the future needs of your business.

If firms want their hiring strategy to withstand all the trials and tribulations that lie ahead, and successfully future-proof their organisation, they will need a search partner who doesn’t just place people, but who can come into the boardroom long before a mandate starts, and shape the decisions that come before placement by:

• Providing market intelligence and perspective on competitor behaviour
• Sensing market shifts and mapping the most crucial leadership needs 
• Defining the reality and the structure to ensure the search is focused correctly
• Challenging assumptions and bringing clarity on who will take the business forward

At Hanover, our expertise and market depth means we are brought into conversations at the earliest moment. We behave as strategic co-architects, shaping direction and designing roles before the search begins. That’s what executive search is evolving into in 2026. The placement is no longer the product. The real value lies in the thinking that precedes it. 

If you’d like to explore how we can support your leadership strategy or upcoming search, get in touch with us today.