Banks have greatly reduced their contingency planning for Brexit, shifting fewer than 1500 jobs from the UK, according to research by the Financial Times.
News has been rife of large numbers of jobs and assets being relocated to the likes of Dublin and Luxembourg in contingency planning for the UK’s departure from the European Union. FT‘s research though suggests though that this has been overstated.
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The top 15 international banks present in London have cut fewer than 3500 UK jobs since June 2016, with senior executives revealing that less than 1500 of these were on account of Brexit.
Banks’ Brexit planning
Nomura, Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse have all made cuts to their London headcount, but these were due to wider restructuring of their businesses and were incidental to Brexit.
UBS in fact has grown its UK workforce, insourcing work previously done by contractors, while BNP Paribas also employs more people in the UK than it did in 2016.
In many cases, the number of jobs moved away owing to Brexit represents but a small portion employed by the banks in the UK as a whole.
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By GlobalDataCitigroup have shifted around 80 jobs away from Britain since the referendum out of a total of about 6000.
HSBC’s investment bank has moved around 250 people, still leaving a 4200-strong workforce in London.
The figures reported do not include moves scheduled to be carried out immediately before Britain physically leaves the EU, but even these do not represent a substantial tally, and will still see the totals fall way short of bank’s original forecasts.
People familiar with the matter suggest that banks are adopting a wait-and-see approach and taking as little pre-emptive action as possible.
FT‘s research is backed up by Reuters‘ analysis that the expected surge of jobs created in Germany and France has yet to really manifest, with only 301 new roles listed.
Meanwhile, many of the world’s biggest banks, including Goldman Sachs, Citi, JP Morgan and UBS, have been looking to fill over 1500 new jobs in the UK between them.
