Barclays is hiring a dozen traders in Frankfurt as Brexit approaches

It wasn't all that long ago that Barclays' CEO Jes Staley said he saw no reason to shift jobs to Europe because of Brexit. - At one point, Barclays' fondness for keeping jobs in London was even mooted as the reason why no one there was resigning. Now, after the April revelation that Barclays was planning to split its euro rates trading between Frankfurt and London and the July news that Barclays was planning to shift between 40 and 50 jobs from its London investment bank to Frankfurt, it seems that Barclays is stocking up with traders in Germany's financial centre.

A quick look at Barclays' careers site reveals that the British bank is advertising around 12 trading jobs in Frankfurt. They include senior roles such as a German-based director-level head of equity derivatives trading, plus jobs for FX traders, credit traders and rates traders.

A spokesman for Barclays said: “Managing the allocation of financial resources within Barclays International is key to ensuring that we are positioned to maximize benefits for our clients as well as for our shareholders.”

The Frankfurt trading jobs come as the bank has been doing some heavy hiring for its markets business globally. At the start of this month, Barclays said it had hired 30 managing directors across its markets division globally since the start of 2017.  Big hires in fixed income currencies and commodities trading include Michael Lubinksy, the former RBS trader who joined last year via hedge fund Brevan Howard and  Sharut Kalra, a credit trader who joined from Goldman Sachs last year.

Barclays has selected Dublin as its post-Brexit European hub, but appears to be focusing its European trading operation in Frankfurt. Both it and Deutsche Bank both shifted some of their euro interest rate swaps to Germany for clearing in June.

Barclays already has fixed income global markets professionals based in Frankfurt: Isabel Heske is an MD in rates distribution in the Frankfurt office, for example. The latest spate of job adverts suggest that Barclays is looking for new staff in German rather than shifting existing staff internally from London.

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