While talk of a sudden exodus might be overblown, there is a danger that jobs in the sector could gradually slip away from the capital. Barclays’ Peter Gordon says that, over the next decade, ‘we might lose the battle to New York… to Paris and elsewhere’. He argues that the key thing to avoid this is continue access to the single market. That’s the ‘pinch point’ of Brexit, he says. Dr Swati Dhingra from the LSE agrees. It’s market access that matters, she says. Take Swiss banks: there’s a reason they base themselves in Britain rather than closer to home. They do this because Switzerland’s status outside the EU means it doesn’t benefit from the same access as the UK does currently. ‘It’s also about future regulation,’ says Dhingra. Brexit will inevitably change the way banks operate in Britain. But how? We still don’t know. It’s this uncertainty of current and future regulations that matters for investments coming into the sector and the predicted negative economic impacts, she says.

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