Goldman Sachs warns London banking staff of impending move to Frankfurt

Investment bank Goldman Sachs has warned more than a dozen City trading and sales staff that they should be prepared to move to Frankfurt within weeks.

City Am understands that the staff set to move are in the bank’s debt capital markets and derivatives teams working on German accounts. They have been given notice that they can expect to move to Frankfurt by June.

Read more: Goldman Sachs CEO: Our Brexit plans will soon reach the point of no return

Goldman Sachs’ outspoken chief executive Lloyd Blankfein has previously warned that the bank could move large numbers of staff to Paris and Frankfurt to minimise business disruption caused by Brexit.

Speaking to the BBC in January Blankfein said that the bank had already started to prepare to ramp up its presence in other European cities in response to Brexit.

Blankfein said: “We’ve rented, I think, 10 floors in a new building in Frankfurt because we think we’ll have to have that many people there. Will we? I don’t know. But we have no choice but to start [taking] space, building out the space.

He said that the shift away from London would not be undertaken in on move, but was more likely to be a series of steps.

“There’s [will not be] one moment where it’s all or nothing, but every month incremental steps are being taken, and at some point we’re going to do things that are not going to be undone,” he said.

A Frankfurt lobbying group predicted that the German banking hub could gain as many as 100,000 finance jobs by 2021 as a result of the UK leaving the EU.