Scottish exodus rears its head once again
Just when you thought the prospect of a brain drain from Scotland's financial services sector had been all but extinguished....well, it probably hasn't.
A long, and rather bleak, article in today's Scotsman points to how the real impact of the humbling of HBOS and RBS has yet to be felt in Edinburgh. With the city's standing as a financial centre taking a battering, and the centre of gravity shifting to London within Scotland's largest banks, more people are looking south for new opportunities.
"HBOS's main centre of activity has moved to London, and some people have gone too - some from RBS as well," said Sir George Mathewson, who orchestrated RBS's rapid growth into a global bank.
"It would be strange if, after the events and restructuring that has gone on, there was not a loss of people. I would expect that to happen, but it would be nice to think that there's some efforts to minimise it."
By and large, this is referring to the senior ranks, with the shift in power towards London making it much more difficult to attract and retain top talent (which could hit other parts of the economy). But when you're talking about rank and file bank staff, this argument doesn't really hold water.
One of the problems with this talk of Scotland losing out is that the two largest banks have been disproportionately favourable when it comes to shrinking their operations here. Of the 16,000 jobs cut at Lloyds, just 1,000 have gone in Scotland, while 1,300 of RBS's 17,100 redundancies have occurred north of the border.
There's also the fact that as a direct result of its restructuring process, both RBS and Lloyds have been bolstering its operations north of the border through the recruitment of change management, systems implementation and strategic business review professionals (although admittedly these are largely contract roles).
Still, as last week's Direct Line job cuts show, redundancies are still happening in Scotland's financial sector. And, if you're on the receiving end of these cuts, opportunities are still not exactly plentiful north of the border currently.
In this scenario, London looks a little bit more tempting.
