FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Deutsche Bank expects to move fewer staff than some senior officials had expected from London to the continent following Britain's departure from the European Union.
"Not thousands will move from London, but rather hundreds", Stefan Hoops, the head of Deutsche Bank's capital market division in Germany, told journalists on Wednesday.
While the bank has never been specific about how many jobs may leave London following Brexit, one of its top executives said in 2017 that up to 4,000 might be affected.
Deutsche Bank is headquartered in Frankfurt, but has large operations in Britain, where 8,600 of its staff are based.
Last week, Chief Executive John Cryan told a newspaper that initially several hundred jobs would be created in Frankfurt, as well as in other cities such as Milan and Paris.
"Mainly bankers, technology experts and traders work in London and they want to stay there," Cryan was quoted by Neue Zuercher Zeitung as saying. "The booking centre will move for sure, but that affects less jobs than many think."
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Deutsche Bank is planning a new booking centre in Frankfurt to handle the billions of euros of non-European business routed through London, which may not be allowed after Brexit.
As a result of this, the transactions of Deutsche's 20,000 institutional securities trading clients will be logged through Frankfurt, Deutsche's Hoops said. "That will start in coming weeks."
A few senior traders will relocate to Frankfurt from London, as well as risk managers, legal staff and support functions, Hoops said. "But the lion's share of traders will remain in London."
Traders will mainly keep handling orders in London, but the actual booking of the trades will then be executed in Frankfurt.
Competition for highly qualified staff, especially in risk managing and legal functions, will be fierce as other banks also relocate some operations to Frankfurt from London, Hoops said.
Up to 400 IT staff have started migrating 100 different trading systems, which had so far not been installed in Frankfurt, Hoops added.
(Reporting by Andreas Framke; Writing by Arno Schuetze; Editing by Mark Potter)