In my opinion, not unreasonably for these two reasons:
Banks generally delegate responsibility for huge sums of money to quite a low level in the organisation, and their clients are usually much smaller than the bank is. There needs to be some kind of parity in the apparent seniority between client and bank. The CEO of an SME doesn't want to be dealing with someone who sounds junior when discussing deals regarding the total value of their company.
Banks are so large and complex that it's usually not far off the bottom wrung of the org chart that you're responsible for huge sums of money/risks/contracts. People in smaller organisations with similar monetary responsibilities (in absolute terms) are usually the senior ones with senior sounding titles.
For example, I was a lowly infrastructure engineer in a tier 1 global investment bank working in the platform engineering team not far off the bottom of the ladder, yet I was responsible for infrastructure spending decisions in the scale of 10-100 million dollars. A drop in the ocean for the IT budget of $5Bn dollars, but a larger monetary responsibility than the CEO of a mid sized company has. So yes, I was called a VP.
I know people who are less than 5 years into their first jobs from graduation who are VPs in Engineering, in financial firms in London (City) and New York (Wall Street). Organisation/culture/industry matters more than subject, I think.
In my experience it's pretty rare to get the VP title in less than 5 years. In fact in my graduate intake nobody did it in that timescale. Good people would get it in 5-7 years.
