BAML London staff nervous about Dublin after observing Chester

Do you work for Bank of America in London? Are you in finance, risk, compliance, technology, operations, or…wholesale credit? If so, you may be one of the 125 people being shunted to Dublin from July. And if you don’t want to go there? You may well be asked to leave: it’s Dublin or redundancy.

While senior BofA executives like George Carp, a veteran MD in global banking and markets, have happily followed former CFO Bruce Thompson to BofA’s Dublin office, there seems to be a mood of resistance in the air among other employees in London. Most of those we spoke to said they’d rather stay.

Part of the problem seems to be suspicion about the career implications of moving to Dublin after observing the trajectories of BofA staff who moved to Chester. Bank of America opened a Chester office in 2010 and plans to have 1,000 people there by 2020. One BofA insider said staff moved to Chester in the expectation that setting up teams in the new office would be good for their careers. Now they’re stuck: “Some of them want to move back and it’s very difficult for them to get a job with the same rank in London.”

BofA didn’t respond to a request on staff concerns. The same individual said he’d rather activate (unspecified) back-up plan a, b, or c than move away from London – for fear that he’d find it hard to get a job in the capital again. BofA will retain a big presence in London after Brexit: in March it extended its lease on its London office until 2032. 

Not all BofA are disparaging about Dublin. One said he’d keep an open mind. Another suggested that a move to the Irish capital would at least be better than a move to Charlotte, North Carolina, where BofA’s head office is based.

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