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Notes -
Finance wasn't exclusively upper class in the UK even in the past. During the post-WWII years, I have a grandfather who made it pretty far in finance coming from a family of mid-ranking naval officers. Like a lot of people in finance in those days, his main assets were that he was reliable, risk-averse, sceptical, and disciplined in a relaxed, gentle, unambitious way. He worked in London, but lived in a modest cottage in the Shires, and he got a fair number of clients just because of his reputation from "the War". Ironically, he almost never spoke about the War, because he had lost too many friends and family, and killed too many people himself - not an easy thing to do for a gentle giant.
The shift in the 1980s/1990s period, AFAIK, was that UK finance became more open to working class people, women, non-white people, foreigners, and even Irish people^. Most of all, the big money jobs were increasingly for those who were ambitious, risk-loving, optimistic, and disciplined in an intense, obsessive way. And naturally most people entering finance hadn't even been in a serious fist-fight, let alone built up a reputation in war.
^ This comes up in David Lodge's Nice Work, where the middle class academic woman (the book's main character) is finds out that a seemingly ditzy working class London lass (her brother's girlfriend, as I recall) is earning much more than her in the supposedly reactionary world of Thatcher-era finance. The working class woman comes from a family of bookies, and so thinking fast with numbers is to her like waking up early is to a farmer's daughter.
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