Highest-paid bankers left London for EU ahead of Brexit, study finds

by Huw Jones

LONDON (Reuters) – Nearly a hundred very high-income bankers left the UK before the country left the European Union, the European Banking Authority (EBA) said on Wednesday, the latest example of how Brexit rocked the financial sector.

In its annual survey of bankers earning at least one million euros per year, the EBA finds that 95 of them left the UK in 2019.

Despite everything, the country remains by far the one hosting the most highly paid bankers: of the 4,963 counted in total within the European Union in 2019, 71% of them lived in the United Kingdom.

The remuneration retained of at least one million euros per year includes the base salary, bonuses and pension contributions.

The United Kingdom officially left the European Union in December 2020. By this date, several banks and financial institutions had transferred 7,000 employees from London to the European continent in order to guarantee their clients access to the EU financial market.

As a result of these transfers, the number of the best paid bankers had climbed to 492 in Germany in 2019 against 450 in 2018, to 270 in France against 234 and to 241 in Italy against 206, indicates the ABE.

“The increase in top incomes is mainly due to the impact of the relocation of staff from the UK to the EU 27 as part of the Brexit preparations,” EBA said in its study.

Most of these high income bankers work in the main financial centers of Frankfurt, Paris and Milan.

(Report by Huw Jones, Blandine Hénault for the French version, edited by Bertrand Boucey)