Companies In The News ...And How They Were Assessed

Banks and Brexit: “secret blueprint”

With just a week to go until UK banks must formally notify the Prudential Regulation Authority about “how they plan to mitigate Brexit risks”, Barclays has chosen Dublin (left) as its European Union HQ, said Ben Martin in The Daily Telegraph.

The bank already has an Irish banking licence and around 120 staff in the country. The loss of “passporting rights”, which enable financial services firms to operate throughout the EU, is one of the biggest fears of City investment banks, and European centres have been vying to attract their business – Frankfurt, for example, has offered to exempt “risk takers” from tough labour laws that make it difficult to fire people. But concern is mounting “about the damage facing employers if they are forced to move operations to the Continent”, said Patrick Jenkins in the Financial Times. Hence the importance of the latest City delegation to Brussels, led by the former City minister Mark Hoban, who has been working on a “secret blueprint” for a free trade deal on financial services. The Association for Financial Markets in Europe reckons it would cost British banks s15bn in restructuring, and up to s40bn in capital, if Britain crashed out of the EU in March 2019 with no deal in place. Senior City figures hope that Hoban’s plan, which has “the unofficial support of senior figures in Whitehall”, will make a “credible” start for government negotiations.