26 April 2017

Financial Times: Deutsche Bank executive warns thousands of UK roles at Brexit risk

A senior Deutsche Bank executive has warned that nearly half the German lender’s 9,000 staff in the UK could be forced to leave the country under pressure from regulators because of Brexit.

The comments by Sylvie Matherat, head of regulation at Deutsche, represent the most serious warning from Germany’s biggest bank about the impact of Brexit on its activities in Britain, where it runs one of the largest investment banking operations in the City of London.

Ms Matherat, a former deputy director-general at the French central bank who joined Deutsche three years ago, told a conference in Frankfurt that 4,000 staff could be forced to relocate to keep serving EU-based clients if the UK lost access to the European single market.

“For front-office people, if you want to deal with EU clients you need to be based in the EU, in continental Europe. Does that mean that I have to move all the front-office people to Germany or not?” asked Ms Matherat.

“And we are speaking of 2,000 people — that’s not a small number,” she said. “Then you have the local supervisors who rightly say, come on, if you have your client here, if you book your operation here, you need to have your risk-management capacity here,” she added. “It means another 2,000 people.”

Lawyers say that big banks are facing growing pressure from clients to explain how Brexit will affect the way they provide services on the ground. This is prompting some groups to move staff dealing with clients in the other 27 EU countries into those locations. [...]

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