Barclays has divulged its plan for for shifting jobs out of the UK after Brexit. It’s surprisingly benign.
After last week’s warning from Jamie Dimon that J.P. Morgan’s Brexit-induced job movement might be “more than we’d hoped for” and suggestions that anything from 20% (UBS) to 50% (Goldman Sachs) of London banking jobs could be displaced by the divorce, Brexit pessimists had the upper hand. Barclays has slapped then down again.
The British bank’s plan makes Brexit look inconsequential. Bloomberg reports that, ‘if UK-based finance companies lose easy access to the trading bloc,” then Barclays is planning to, “add about 150 staff,” to a new European hub in Dublin. Given that Barclays’ investment bank employs an estimated 10,000 people in the UK, the implication is that fewer than 2% of the bank’s British jobs would be affected. Teacups have seen bigger storms.
Barclays’ apparent conclusion that Brexit is no big deal comes after CEO Jes Staley suggested it’s more of an administrative issue than anything else. “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 told the Financial Times last week. Nonetheless, Bloomberg suggests Barclays could move some FX traders and “derivative specialists” to Dublin, along with compliance and HR staff. If Dublin becomes Barclays’ main office in Europe, Staley indicated that Barclays’ Frankfurt office could then become a branch of its Dublin operation – which seems a blow to Frankfurt’s post-Brexit aspirations.
Separately, an unidentified banker in NYC has decided to jack it all in and police his fellow citizens. “I did not like the kind of person this industry was turning me into, and the future prospects it offered,” the unidentified M&A banker (known only as Tacobanana) says on forum Wall Street Oasis. “All that ambition, all those desires of being the very best of the pool and get deals done, was gone….I don’t want to be sitting on my ass in an office doing something I don’t care for anymore.” He’s decided to return to his hometown and become a cop: “think FBI.” “How big is your nest egg?,” is the main response.
0 comments: