Banks need Brexit transition details by early 2018: RBS head

Royal Bank of Scotland Group Chairman Howard Davies said details of a post-Brexit transitional deal with the European Union need to be outlined in the next five months to stop more financial-services jobs from leaving London. “If there are no details by the first quarter of next year, the number of moves of people out of London will accelerate,” Davies said on Sky News on Sunday. If nothing is certain by then, “I think people will trigger those contingency plans” requested by the Bank of England for the UK exit from the EU. A “relatively small” number of RBS’s employees will leave Britain’s capital and financial hub after the U.K. quits the EU in March 2019, Davies said, with a “re-balancing” of financial activity in Europe. The bank is setting up a subsidiary in Amsterdam, to which 150 jobs will be moved.