Deutsche Bank could move as many as half its 4,600 Manhattan staff to smaller US hubs in the next five years, the lender’s US head told the Financial Times, underlining the threat to New York’s dominance as a corporate centre in the aftermath of the pandemic.
“It [the pandemic] has taught us a tonne,” said Christiana Riley, chief executive for Deutsche in the Americas. The fact that many staff had been successfully working from home for the past nine months had neutralised what were previously “bitter fights” over whether jobs could be sent to lower-cost centres.
Ms Riley, who is also a member of Deutsche’s management board, said that the New York headcount could “conceivably” be cut in half within five years, depending on the evolution of “smaller hubs and pockets”.