FIN.

Bank of England expects 130 licence applications before Brexit

Comments made by Sam Woods, Chief Executive Officer of the Prudential Regulation Authority (PRA) were reported in an article published by Reuters, in which he stated that the Bank of England expects at least 130 financial firms from across Europe to apply for licences to continue operating in the UK after Brexit. He also commented that the PRA will have to decide by Christmas if branches of European Union financial firms in London must convert to subsidiaries and be directly supervised by the PRA.

He also said the PRA received more than 400 responses to its request for banks to report on their contingency plans if the UK leaves the EU in March 2019 without new trading arrangements or a transition deal in place. However, of these, the UK based banks who want to maintain links with customers elsewhere in the EU, are more advanced in their thinking than the banks based elsewhere in the EU who want to continue serving UK customers.

Although Mr Woods agreed with the findings of a Reuters survey published last week that around 10,000 finance jobs will be shifted out of Britain or created overseas in the next few years in the initial wave, if the UK is denied access to Europe’s single market; he expects London will continue to be one of the world’s largest financial centres in the coming decades despite some politicians and economists prediction that London will lose its pre-eminent status as a global hub for finance because of Brexit.

FIN. Team