Here are the biggest banks’ plans for Brexit
Big investment banks will begin the process of moving some London-based operations into new hubs inside the European Union within weeks after UK Prime Minister Theresa May set a date to trigger the formal mechanism for quitting the bloc. Frankfurt and Dublin are emerging as the biggest winners. Bank of America, Standard Chartered and Barclays are considering Ireland’s capital for their EU base to ensure continued access to the single market, said people familiar with the plans, asking not to be named because the plans aren’t public. Goldman Sachs Group and Citigroup are among banks eyeing Frankfurt, other people said.
Bloomberg News conducted interviews and reviewed public statements to discover what each major bank is planning.
Bank of America
Bank of America views Dublin as its default destination for a new EU hub if the UK loses easy access to the single market, one of the firm’s top executives in Germany said earlier this month. The bank will likely move some jobs to other cities across the region, including Frankfurt, Madrid, Luxembourg and Amsterdam, said Nikolaus Naerger, Bank of America’s head of corporate banking in Germany, Switzerland and Austria. No final decisions have been made.
Goldman Sachs
The Wall Street firm is considering making Frankfurt its hub inside the EU and could move as many as 1,000 employees, including traders and senior managers, according to a person familiar with the matter. Chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein has publicly said the bank has shelved plans to move more key operations to the UK. “We were on track to move more and more of our global activities, so global ops, global tech — all those things made more and more sense to operate out of the UK,” because of the time zone, Blankfein said in a Bloomberg interview in Davos.
JPMorgan
JPMorgan Chase & Co has scouted for office space in both Dublin and Frankfurt, people with knowledge of the matter said this month. Before the referendum, CEO Jamie Dimon said as many as 4,000 of its 16,000 UK employees could be moved to the continent after Brexit. “We have to accommodate the laws of the land in both Britain and the EU, and that will determine how many jobs and how many people you have to move,” Dimon said in January. “It looks like there will be more job movement than we hoped for.”
UBS
Chairman Axel Weber said this month that the bank will make a final decision on whether to move as many as 1,500 of about 5,000 UK investment banking staff soon after Brexit is triggered. “Yes, we will have to move bankers — we have an SE in Frankfurt, we have an appropriate setup in Spain,” Andrea Orcel, head of UBS Group’s investment bank, said in Davos, referring to the Swiss bank’s German subsidiary, which is licensed to do investment banking. “We still have flexibility to decide where to go, but we will definitely have to move.”
HSBC
HSBC Holdings CEO Stuart Gulliver said in January that staff generating about 20 per cent of its London investment-banking revenue may move to Paris, where it acquired a French commercial bank more than a decade ago. “Activities specifically covered by EU legislation will move,” he said. Before the June referendum, Gulliver said a Brexit vote would likely result in about 1,000 of the bank’s 5,000 London-based staff relocating to the French capital.
Barclays
The UK bank has settled on Dublin for its main hub inside the EU and is planning to add about 150 staff there, people with knowledge of the decision said earlier this year. Barclays CEO Jes Staley has struck a different tone to other bank bosses. He said in Davos that it would be “very difficult” to dislodge a financial center like London. If needed, Barclays may reassign its Frankfurt branch to its Irish subsidiary, he said. “Same people, same traders, you have to book a trade in Ireland as opposed to London, but that’s not a wholesale move of our capability from London to Ireland,” he said. — Bloomberg