It’s only a graze? Project Fear fast becoming Project Reality for the City as roughly £800bn in assets shift to the EU ahead of Brexit, according to @EY
ft.com/content/c9d2a2…
ft.com/content/c9d2a2…
For reference, the combined size of the banking sector in the UK is about £8 trillion. So that’s about 10% of the total bank assets in the UK and we haven’t even left yet.
We think this is an under-estimate: the @EY figures include 36% of 222 firms that have confirmed or stated their intention to relocate some business to the EU. We’re working on our own tracker and we’ve already identified more than 100 firms that have moved / are planning to move
Lots of firms haven’t said anything publicly, but virtually every firm with any business in the rest of the EU will have to move at least of its business / staff / legal entities / assets 3/13
What are the 64% of firms who haven’t confirmed plans waiting for? As things stands, the UK is leaving the EU without a deal in 12 weeks 4/13 ey.com/uk/en/newsroom…
This is not a drill: as one firm said to us ‘These aren’t contingency plans, these aren’t even plans. This is what we have already done.’ 5/13
Some of the numbers for individual firms are eye-popping: Deutsche Bank is looking at shifting more than €400bn back to Frankfurt 6/13 reuters.com/article/us-bri…
Frankfurt Main Finance, the body that promotes Frankfurt as a financial centre, thinks 30+ banks will move around €800bn in assets to Germany from the UK 7/13 ft.com/content/a9111f…
Barclays is the biggest bank in Ireland with €250bn in assets (more than a fifth of its total balance sheet) after shifting ownership of its EU branches to Dublin 8/13 independent.ie/business/irish…
And four big US banks alone are set to move around €250bn from the UK to Frankfurt 9/13: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
While the initial numbers on jobs moving from UK to EU and new jobs being created in the EU seem quite low, we have long argued this will change over time as local supervisors push for more local substance. 10/13
Initially, many supervisors are being flexible and allowing firms to relocate / set-up / expand with the bare minimum of staff in time for D-Day. That won’t last forever. 11/13
So for the timebeing we’re sticking with out initial forecast that roughly 35,000 jobs will relocate in the medium term, or about 10% of the financial sector workforce in the ‘City’ 12/13
But it's only a flesh wound...
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