• Haydn Lightfoot, Senior Director at Synechron Business Consulting


• 10.05.2017 08:30 am
undisclosed , Haydn Lightfoot, Senior Director at Synechron, heads up the business consulting team and has spent two decades in the regulatory sector. Haydn has worked with many of the world’s biggest banks and is an expert in the fields of regulatory compliance and banking operations.

To see over a quarter of financial services firms making clear their intention to move either jobs or activity from London to another city in Europe is not a surprise. Banks and other financial services companies like certainty and there is currently no clarity on the type of access the UK will have to the Single Market after Brexit, something which will be key to many of these firms’ business models. Financial passporting is a crucial part of how banks in particular operate across Europe and for nearly half of those tracked to have announced plans to move either jobs or operations to Europe is expected, as many are such complex organisations that plans and processes need to be put in place now. Waiting until it is known what the Brexit deal looks like will be too late.

We have shown previously that it could cost on average £50k per role to relocate from London to another European financial centre, when taking into consideration estimates on relocation packages, hiring and redundancy, equipping a new office plus other costs. For an investment bank moving say 4,000 of its workforce to Frankfurt this would translate to estimated one-off costs of approx. £200m. Banks are likely therefore to only be moving staff where and when it is deemed absolutely necessary.