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* Goldman Sachs, Barclays, Morgan Stanley move senior
bankers
* Regulatory pressure and ease in pandemic prompt
relocations
* Paris beats Frankfurt to claim biggest share of moves
By Pamela Barbaglia, Tommy Wilkes and Gwénaëlle Barzic
LONDON/PARIS, May 12 (Reuters) - Investment banks are
shifting more rainmakers out of London to financial centres
across the European Union, accelerating the pace of moves after
the pandemic and uncertainty over Britain's access to the bloc
slowed relocations.
Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Goldman Sachs
are among those moving senior bankers, according to
sources at the lenders, as European regulators push banks to
better staff their EU offices and travel restrictions ease.
Local hiring has also increased.
The lack of a breakthrough in talks for a meaningful deal
between Brussels and London on financial services post-Brexit
has added to the impetus. Client-facing bankers in London are
required a "chaperone" based inside the bloc whenever they speak
to clients, spurring some to relocate to avoid that complication
when sealing deals.
Lifestyle choices are also playing their part, with traders
and other senior staff moving too. Working from home during the
pandemic enabled some bankers to leave London for warmer
continental climes, mirroring a shift by Wall Street executives
to Miami during the height of the COVID outbreak in New York.
Some European bankers are now looking at making the shift
permanent.
"There is Brexit but not only, there is a post-Covid
phenomenon too," said Emmanuel Goldstein, Morgan Stanley's
France chief executive, explaining that some French bankers were
returning home having spent their entire careers overseas.
Morgan Stanley will add 50 staff to its 150-strong Paris
office by end-2021 and plans to double in size by 2024 through a
mix of relocations and local hiring as it expands its central
Parisian hub, Goldstein said.
Barclays' head of M&A for Europe and the Middle East, Pier
Luigi Colizzi, has recently moved to Milan and will run the
region's deals team from there, two sources familiar with the
lender said, making him one of the few regional M&A heads based
outside of London.
The bank has also beefed up its offices in Paris and
Frankfurt with local hires, poaching senior M&A bankers from BNP
Paribas and Greenhill & Co.
Goldman Sachs' head of European corporate and sovereign
derivatives, Alessandro Dusi, has moved to Milan, where overall
headcount has swelled to about 60 from 20 in 2017, a person
familiar with the matter told Reuters. In its Madrid office,
Goldman now has 60 staff, double pre-Brexit levels, a second
source close to the bank said.
Barclays and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
Predictions of an exodus of tens of thousands from London
after the 2016 Brexit referendum have not yet materialised --
consultancy EY calculates that 7,600 Brexit-related financial
services jobs had left London up until March, a fraction of
London's half-a-million financial workforce.
But bankers and analysts say many of the moves are still to
happen.
JPMorgan is to shift around 200 more employees into
the EU from London this year including traders, bringing total
relocations since the referendum to some 400 with the largest
number in Paris, a person familiar with the plans said.
Financial lobby group Paris Europlace in 2016 predicted
Brexit would create 10,000 new finance jobs in Paris by 2025. To
date, fewer than half of those jobs have materialised but it's
sticking with its forecast.
Up to 35,000 London financial jobs could eventually
disappear, said William Wright of think tank New Financial.
The European Central Bank's bank supervisor, Andrea Enria,
this month said that he understood the pandemic had slowed down
relocations and the ECB's objective was not "to put people in
chains and move them to Frankfurt".
But he stressed banks need to ensure people in charge of
interactions with European clients and managing risk are inside
the bloc.
"There are banks that have done the 'full monty' and are
already there and we're fully satisfied and there are banks that
have done much less," he said.
PARIS AHEAD
Expectations Frankfurt would emerge the biggest beneficiary
of 7,600 Brexit job moves to date have been confounded, with
Paris attracting the most people, according to EY, which
estimates 2,800 jobs have gone to Paris. Bank of America, for
example, has 400-odd staff in the French capital.
Other cities including Milan, Madrid and Amsterdam are also
luring senior figures as banks give employees more leeway about
where to work.
The Bank of France's banking supervisory arm, ACPR, said by
December 2020, 50 financial firms from Britain had obtained
authorisation in Paris, representing almost 2,500 jobs
transferred to the French capital, along with at least 170
billion euros in assets.
"We are seeing an acceleration of jobs in investment banking
and trading activities after a slowdown due to COVID," said
Arnaud de Bresson, Paris Europlace's managing director, adding
that bankers had chosen Paris because of its proximity to
London, the lifestyle and its "capital markets culture."
Morgan Stanley's Goldstein said there was "a new found
attractiveness" for working in France today, pointing to a more
pro-business climate under President Emmanuel Macron.
According to estimates from the city of Frankfurt, it
expects 2,000 new Brexit-related jobs created by end-2022, up
from the 1,500 new jobs created in Frankfurt by end-2019.
A senior banker at UBS said some employees had relocated to
Italy or the Netherlands rather than Frankfurt for personal
reasons, and the city's bland image and relatively small size
didn't help.
"We have to do more to promote it," the banker said.
Bankers say they have struggled to find sufficient skilled
staff in Frankfurt and that German regulators' inexperience
versus French supervisors in overseeing several major investment
banks had frustrated some American banks in particular.
Still, Frankfurt offices are expanding hiring too. Andreas
Halin, founder of Global Mind Executive Search Consultants, said
senior bankers had realised they "cannot hide behind COVID" and
were under regulatory pressure to expand Frankfurt headcount.
While Paris is ahead for staffing numbers, no city has
emerged a single EU capital markets hub.
Germany is the preferred destination for EU legal bank
entities, while Paris has won trading-related divisions.
Amsterdam has gained much of the stock and swap trading
departing London, as well as trading platforms, but few new
jobs.
New York has meanwhile emerged the global winner in
derivatives, winning a bigger volume of the interest rate swap
trading leaving London than the EU.
(Additional reporting by Huw Jones in London and Tom Sims and
Patricia Uhlig in Frankfurt
Editing by Rachel Armstrong and Elaine Hardcastle)
