Barclays planning Dublin headquarters move post-Brexit, report says

Barclays has begun planning to make Dublin its European headquarters, once Britain leaves the European Union, according to a Reuters report on Thursday afternoon.

Citing a source close to the matter, the news wire said Barclays was drawing up plans for a potential move but the bank refused to confirm the news.

A spokesman for Barclays, which currently calls London's Canary Wharf its corporate home, said the bank had “made clear repeatedly that we will plan for a range of Brexit contingencies, including building greater capacity into our existing operations in Dublin."

"Identifying available office space is a necessary and predictable part of that contingency planning process," the spokesman told Reuters.

Barclays' current corporate is 1 Churchill Place, in London's Canary Wharf.

HSBC recently said it would need to move roughly 1,000 London jobs to its Paris office due to Brexit, but would keep its HQ in the Square Mile.

UBS has mooted plans to move 300 jobs to Madrid from London, while banking heavyweights JP Morgan have suggested they will move between 4,000 and 3,000 to an EU country.

Some analysts have suggested banks had an incentive to publicly threaten to move positions away from London as a bargaining chip to obtain the best possible deal for the sector and themselves when the country negotiates with the EU.

Eduardo Gorab, UK property specialist at Capital Economics said these threats should be taken "with a dose of scepticism”.

Gorab said such a threat could prove difficult to carry out due to supply conditions in Europe, rent prices, reluctant bankers willing to move due to low income and low corporation tax, though Dublin offers pretty attractive terms on many of those measures as well as a low language barrier, to be sure.