HSBC confirms plans for partial exit from London due to Brexit

HSBC will need to move roughly 1,000 London jobs to its Paris office due to Brexit, the bank's chief executive Stuart Gulliver confirmed on Wednesday.

Following Theresa May's confirmation that the government plans to withdraw from the European single market, banks are likely to lose their 'passport' to sell financial services throughout the bloc without restriction.

Gulliver told Bloomberg television in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Davos that he felt "London will remain a global financial centre, and I believe the revenue impact of Brexit on financial services will be made good in two or three years’ time".

"I don’t see the foreign exchange market moving, the investment grade bond market moving, the equity market moving and the high-yield bond market moving."

Focusing on HSBC itself, he said a fifth of the roughly 5,000 people employed by its investment bank in London would be likely to move, with the roles to be "activities covered specifically by European financial regulation, looking at our own numbers – that’s about 20% of the revenue".

Early last year, before the referendum, the banking giant said it had decided to retain its headquarters in the UK, but mooted that it could shift 1,000 wholesale operation jobs to France in the even of an exit from European Union.

HSBC had previously threatened to move to Hong Kong in retaliation for planned stricter UK regulation, though David Cameron's government took a noticeably softer line on banks in 2015, firing the head of the Financial Conduct Authority and pulling back from a major review of operational culture within the sector.