Daily Times

LONDON: Global banks are still filling job vacancies in London despite concerns that Brexit could threaten the city’s status as a major financial centre, recruiter Hays said on Thursday. Although many financial companies have plans to transfer some jobs to continental Europe to keep serving clients in the single market once Britain leaves the European Union, Hays said they were holding off on pulling the trigger. “The banks have got their contingency plans in place, but they’re waiting to see if they can get any steer at all on the eventual deal that will be done,” Finance Director Paul Venables told Reuters. “The pleasing part is that leavers (in London) are being replaced. This is encouraging for the future of the financial services industry in London. It will still be a very large business when we get through the Brexit part,” he added. Venables said London banks were replacing departing staff in most roles, including in IT and compliance. Smaller rival Robert Walters said on Tuesday that risk, regulatory, audit and cybersecurity were the strongest job functions in finance at the moment. Hays said banks had begun moving staff from Britain to Europe, but numbers remained relatively small. It had not received requests for large-scale financial hiring in Europe, mirroring comments from PageGroup and Robert Walters earlier this week. Hays said net fees from its UK and Ireland operations rose 1 percent in the three months ended Sept. 30 on the same period last year, showing an improvement against a 5 percent fall in the preceding quarter. Hays said its British private sector business continued to experience modest signs of improvement, and Venables forecast that growth in the UK over the next few quarters would remain in line with the first quarter.

Published in Daily Times, October 13^th 2017.