Thursday 02 February 2017 11:48 am

Deutsche Bank’s management board has promised it won’t be the first to leave London after Brexit

Deutsche Bank does not plan to be among the first tranche of financial firms shifting jobs out of London because of Brexit woes.

Speaking at the bank's annual results press conference today, Sylvie Matherat, the German giant's regulatory chief, said: "We will not be a first mover".

Instead, Matherat said the bank would be keeping a careful eye on what moves others in the industry made and would "follow if necessary".

Chief executive John Cryan added: "I'm sure London will fight back and remain an important financial capital."

However, Cryan also stressed there was still uncertainty surrounding what the UK outside the EU would look like. "We actually don't know what Brexit is," he said, before adding that, if the bank did have to move staff out of the UK, Germany was the obvious destination for them to choose.

The words come less than a month after a string of big bank bosses warned they would move staff out of the UK because of Brexit. Both HSBC's chief executive Stuart Gulliver and UBS investment chief Andrea Orcel warned they would have to move up to 1,000 jobs out of London.

Meanwhile, JP Morgan chief executive Jamie Dimon said his bank might have to shift more jobs overseas than he had initially thought.

And German newspaper Handelsblatt has previously reported Goldman Sachs was mulling halving its London workforce in light of Brexit, although the bank has since said no final decision has been made.

Even before the UK decided to leave the EU last June, many in the financial industry warned Brexit could spell the end of many rights enjoyed by the sector, including passporting – a complex set of rights which allows firms in the UK to do business elsewhere in the EEA and vice versa.

However, unlike many of the other banks currently weighing up their post-Brexit options, Deutsche Bank is currently using inbound passporting to do business from the EEA into the UK.

According to figures released by the Financial Conduct Authority last September, 8,008 of the 13,484 firms using passporting it accounted for use inbound passporting.

Deutsche Bank had a tricky 2016, weighed down by ongoing restructuring efforts, litigation costs and a low interest rate environment. The bank today announced net losses for 2016 of €1.4bn (£1.2bn), its second year in a row in the red, and net losses for its fourth quarter of €1.9bn.