HSBC ($HSBC) CEO John Flint recently went on record to say that shifts in job location due to an impending Brexit are "tiny." These jobs were moved from the U.K. to Paris, France and accounted for "tens" of positions, rather than the 1,000 or so that it could transfer should Brexit actually happen.
While alternative data has yet to crack the code on internal personnel shifts within companies, public openings in non-core HSBC locations — outside the U.S., Hong Kong, and United Kingdom — saw a steady increase over the past month.
Interestingly enough, this spike in job openings was not due to positions based in France. In fact, the number of public job openings for positions based in the country declined since November 2018.
This may be due to those shifts in positions from the United Kingdom; logically, if people are accepting a transfer over to a France-based position, there isn't a need to list those particular jobs in that country publicly. However, this is only an inference and a theory as to why this is happening.
Still, Paris is one of the most popular locations in this dataset for new job locations. Yet the actual growth in job openings appears to be coming from the Asia-Pacific region, specifically in China. Below, we're able to see a day-to-day change over time of the top-20 most frequent job opening locations at HSBC for the past month.
