Embarking on a career in finance at a Wall Street bank in Paris might once have been regarded as a consolation prize for those who had failed to find a job in New York, London or Hong Kong.
Saverio Michienzi-Rowedder, a sales and trading trainee at Citigroup’s offices in the French capital’s upscale 8th arrondissement, disagrees.
“People have noticed Paris is not just a backwater office,” said the 22-year-old management graduate on the bank’s newly established programme in the city, adding that several Citi colleagues were now seeking transfers.
While the testimony will cheer French president Emmanuel Macron, who has championed the city’s ambitions to establish itself as the EU’s top financial centre after Brexit, there is more concrete evidence that the pull of Paris is growing.
Seven years since Brexit unleashed a fight for a share of the sales and trading businesses that banks had to shift to the continent to serve European clients, Paris has emerged as a winner as far as jobs go.
“Today juniors who join us think ‘I can start in Paris and build a career there’,” said Thierry Sancier, one of the co-heads of Goldman Sachs’s office by the Arc de Triomphe. “In the ’90s, it was good luck to you.”
Bankers say brasseries, international schools and the ability to live close to their downtown headquarters add to the city’s draw.
Paris was benefiting from a “winner takes all” effect, said Ferdinand Petra, associate professor of finance at HEC Paris business school. “As soon as you start getting some people others tend to think maybe we should go there too.”
Petra pointed out that despite the strides the city had made, it still had a long way to go to challenge the world’s established financial centres. “It’s hard to see London fading and Paris replacing it,” he added.
But for now Paris has momentum. After transferring a combined total of at least 1,600 staff to the city, Wall Street’s biggest banks are set to expand their teams there by at least another 420 people over the next two years, according to a tally of plans at Goldman, JPMorgan, Citi, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America.
The banks picked Paris as their main EU trading hub, enticed by a combination of business-friendly overtures and tax breaks when Macron was elected in 2017, quick train links to London and the lifestyle of a major capital that the likes of Frankfurt could not provide.
While the shift of finance roles from London to the EU after Brexit has not been the exodus forecast by some, almost 7,000 jobs have moved, EY has estimated. Paris has attracted 2,800, trumping Frankfurt’s 1,800 and Dublin’s 1,200, according to the consultancy.
Using a set of criteria that takes in fintech, regulatory and insurance jobs, the French capital has added just over 5,500 finance positions as a result of Brexit, according to an estimate from Choose Paris Region, a government-backed lobby group for the city.
The moves by some banks have encouraged others. From HSBC and Barclays to US lenders such as Wells Fargo and Bank of New York Mellon, Paris has turned into a landing point for more senior investment bankers. National Australia Bank set up operations there last year.
Paris is also vying to be the base for a new anti-money laundering authority planned by the European Commission, which could create up to 450 jobs, said Lionel Grotto Choose Paris Region.
Investors, including sovereign wealth funds such as Singapore’s Temasek, are hiring or setting up shop. Millennium Management doubled staff in Paris last year to about 50 people.
“It’s critical that others made that decision to pick Paris too,” said BofA’s global head of markets James DeMare, on a recent visit to the city. “You want a strong pool of talent. It gives people more comfort, more options.”
BofA was the first major Wall Street bank to consider moving hundreds of people from London to Paris in 2017. The bank’s workforce could possibly go beyond the 600 it has there now, DeMare said.
Known for its elite engineering and maths schools, Paris has fed the ranks of international banks for decades with young recruits, albeit largely either in London or within domestic heavyweights such as BNP Paribas and Société Générale. More banks are now targeting Parisian campuses for local hires.
Morgan Stanley picked Paris for a research centre to back up its trading team, made up of “quants”, or specialised quantitative analysts. It aims to expand it to about 100 people this year, double the original plan, after executives in New York were impressed with recent hires, said Emmanuel Goldstein, Morgan Stanley’s France head.
But the challenges facing Paris are still apparent.
London, which is engaged in a permanent duel with New York to be the world’s top finance centre, still boasts more than 430,000 jobs tied to financial services, according to TheCityUK. Choose Paris Region puts the tally for Paris at 340,000.
Even with the migration of jobs, London’s dominant share of pan-European revenues in key areas, including M&A and lending to large companies, has remained largely intact since 2016, according to data from Dealogic.
Foreign banks, meanwhile, are reluctant to move more back-office and data centre employees to France and elsewhere in the EU in a major way because of the costs as well as the advantage of keeping those functions centralised, including in the UK.
“We’re not proactively going to be bringing them,” said one senior manager at an international bank. “Right now in Paris it’s the essential functions and jobs.”
Many of the employee transfers post-Brexit have come following pressure from the European Central Bank and local financial supervisors, which after Brexit took effect at the start of 2021 required banks to shut down temporary arrangements they had previously made. Regulators also want risk-taking to be managed by teams on the ground, where business is booked.
While Brexit has emboldened the French government to think bigger about Paris’s future as a financial capital, the country’s own politics could yet cast a shadow over those ambitions.
Since a labour law reform in his first year of office that made it easier to hire and fire employees in France, Macron has sought to display his pro-business credentials.
A former Rothschild investment banker, the French president has courted Wall Street heavyweights, including BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink at the Élysée Palace and JPMorgan boss Jamie Dimon at glitzy summits at Versailles.
But the next presidential election in 2027, in which Macron cannot stand again but which Marine Le Pen, the leader of the country’s far right, could try to have another run at, remains a source of potential instability.
For now, some banks are wrestling with far more mundane headaches as they expand in the French capital. Kyril Courboin, who heads JPMorgan France, said that plans to increase its headcount from 800 to 1,000 were putting strains on its space — and on top of that, a growing number of executives from elsewhere in the bank were dropping in.
JPMorgan, which had already bought a second, seven-storey office in 2020, is looking for more space near its central Place Vendôme base.
“As we’ve become the trading hub for the EU, we have an enormous amount of visitors every day, from the UK, from New York — up to 50 or 70 people a day,” Courboin said. “We’re starting to have no more room, it’s a real issue.”
Additional reporting by Owen Walker
