JP Morgan’s Dimon voices concerns on post-Brexit London, as Paris says it is wooing thousands of British bankers
The boss of one of banking's best known names has hinted he is concerned about the fate of London as financial hub following the Brexit vote.
Even before the UK headed to the polls in June, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon warned that a Leave vote could leave the lender with "no choice" but to reorganise its business model, including potentially moving jobs overseas.
Now, Dimon has indicated he's feeling uncertain about what a post-Brexit London will look like.
"We’re just not going to know until the negotiations take place," he said in an interview with Financial News, which was published today. "My goal is that whatever it is, I want to be able to serve clients the next day. So we just want to make sure we’re prepared to serve the client the next day."
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Dimon added: "I wish we could keep it all here [in London]."
JP Morgan's chief exec, who was at one point reported to be in the running for the top spot in President-elect Donald Trump's treasury team, has previously estimated the bank may need to move around 4,000 staff away from the UK to continue serving clients following its departure from the EU.
When asked about job movements by Financial News, Dimon said:
We’ve been planning for a range of outcomes because it’s still as uncertain as a couple months ago. What we know now is that this will be a slow process, and all the staff moves would not happen at once but over a period of years. If there is not a clear transitional period decided early in the process, where passporting rules still apply for a few years after negotiations, then we’d likely have to accelerate our timetable in complying with new rules.
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In a separate interview with Bloomberg, Arnaud de Bresson, managing director of Parisian lobbying outfit Europlace, said the city could easily win over thousands of British bankers, and expected to see some moving in the near future.
"We feel decisions will be taken in the first semester of the new year," de Bresson said. "We see institutions are accelerating their process of thinking."
Benoit de Juvigny, the head of France's financial regulator, said last month that "large international banks" were already in the process of looking into their options for moving to the French capital.
Meanwhile, a report from think tank TheCityUK, published last October, warned the UK could lose 75,000 jobs should the government plump for a so-called hard Brexit.