Break-up may force banks to move from UK: HSBC

HSBC Holdings, Europe’s biggest bank, and rivals including Barclays and Standard Chartered might be forced to move their headquarters out of Britain if the government decided to break up the banks, said Stuart Gulliver, chairman of Europe, West Asia and Global Businesses at HSBC.

The conclusion of a government-sponsored commission examining whether banks should separate their consumer and securities units “had significant implications for where the bank might chose to headquarter its institution and that would also probably be the case for those other two institutions,” Gulliver told a conference in London, referring to Standard Chartered and Barclays.