Fund managers have cut the rate at which they are hiring in London by as much as half since the UK voted to leave the EU in June 2016.
Data provided by LinkedIn, the professional networking site that has grown into a large portal for job ads, showed investment groups have ramped up hiring in Paris and Luxembourg since the referendum. The two other European finance hubs of Dublin and Frankfurt have suffered a drop in recruiting.
“We are seeing a bigger push from UK and US managers to have boots on the ground in Europe,” said Jonathan Doolan, head of Emea at Casey Quirk, Deloitte’s asset management consultancy. “London is not so much being dethroned as diluted.”
The UK’s £8tn asset management industry is one of the most vulnerable parts of the country’s financial services sector as it controls £2.6tn for investors based overseas. The expected loss of valuable passporting rights and the potential change to so-called delegation rules have meant UK fund companies could be cut off from their international clients.
Global fund houses are putting post-Brexit contingency plans into action by launching and staffing operations elsewhere in the EU. A February survey of asset managers by EY, the consultancy, showed more than half had already strengthened their existing operations in Europe as they sought to Brexit-proof their businesses.
LinkedIn provided percentage changes for each quarter, rather than total job numbers, but at the end of last week there were 1,867 investment management jobs posted in London, 339 in Paris and 278 in Luxembourg.
It said the number of London-based investment management job ads posted on its site fell in the first quarter of this year to just under half the number posted in the same period in 2015 and to just over half the number for each of the first two quarters of 2016 in the run-up to the referendum.
There were close to six times as many jobs posted in Luxembourg in the final quarter of 2017 as there were in the first three months of 2015, while Paris had a spike in investment recruiting in the second half of 2016 and first six months of 2017, with more than 10 times as many jobs posted in the first quarter of 2017 compared to the same period in 2015.
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