Firms Fleeing UK Amid Brexit Could Make Holland Financial Center - Regulator

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - The Dutch Authority for the Financial Markets (AFM) has negotiated with 150 firms interested in receiving a financial trading license in the Netherlands and expects the country to become a new home to financial companies fleeing London due to Brexit, the AFM chairwoman said.

"The arrival of these companies will attract other service providers and strengthen the access of Dutch pension funds and other asset managers to the financial markets," AFM Chairwoman Merel van Vroonhoven said on Tuesday said, as quoted by the Dutchnews.nl portal.

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Van Vroonhoven expects that the Netherlands may host up to 30-40 percent of European financial instruments trading after Brexit.

Apart from large platforms CBOE, LSE Turquoise and Bloomberg, which have announced plans to move some operations to Amsterdam from London, smaller traders, banks and other market participants also consider a similar move, she noted.

In June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Although Brexit is scheduled for late March 2019, London and Brussels still cannot agree on a number of key issues, including the Irish border and customs arrangements, making a no-deal scenario a possibility.

In July, Catherine McGuinness, the chairperson of the policy and resources committee of the City of London, said that the UK financial sector could lose up to 12,000 jobs due to Brexit because many financial companies were relocating their businesses to the European Union. According to the Bank of England estimates, the City may lose as many as 5,000 jobs by late March 2019, when the United Kingdom is set to withdraw from the European Union.