Barclays boss backs London's Brexit future in Sky News interview

The chief executive of Barclays (LSE: BARC.L - news) has insisted that London will remain Europe's pre-eminent financial centre even after Britain leaves the EU.

Jes Staley told Sky News that, even though the bank might have to make some "tactical shifts" depending on whether Britain remained in the single market following its departure from the EU, London would remain the principal financial market for Europe.

He added: "It is very difficult to replicate, in any period of time, the overall ecosystem that you find in London.

"From mutual funds, to pension funds, to insurance companies, to hedge funds. So much of their capital is managed through a presence in the United Kingdom.

"The legal architecture around financial markets that you find in the UK, it's just very hard to move that in any period of time. Then it's just a belief I have that the users of capital will find the providers.

"Fundamentally, Europe will not cut itself off from the capital that's available in the United Kingdom."

Mr Staley said that Barclays, which already has employees in some of the cities hoping to take business from London, such as Paris, Frankfurt and Milan, did not expect any of the staffing changes it makes post-Brexit to be to the detriment of the UK.

He was speaking as Barclays reported full year pre-tax profits of £3.2bn , up from £1.1bn in 2015, thanks to a strong rise in earnings from its investment banking division and a sharp fall in charges related to previous misconduct such as the mis-selling of Payment Protection Insurance.

Mr Staley, who became chief executive in December 2015 following more than three decades at the US investment banking giant JP Morgan, insisted that, despite a slight fall in top-line growth, the "core" parts of the bank, which it is not selling, had actually enjoyed growth.

He added: "The core business of Barclays (Swiss: BARC.SW - news) - Barclays UK, Barclays International, our credit card business, our retail banking business - all that collectively - our revenues, income, was actually up in 2016 vs 2015.

"That's one of the better performances of large financial institutions in the world. That underscores that a number of our businesses have very good organic growth potential right now.

"We actually grew our revenues this year. We hope that portends our ability to grow revenues in the next number of years."

The banking veteran said that, despite concerns over the recent rise in consumer indebtedness in countries such as the US and the UK, he was relaxed about the situation: "We think we've run Barclaycard UK and Barclaycard in the US with very conservative underwriting standards.

"There have been some uptick in impairment in the US credit card business but from very low levels.

"Impairment is very much connected to unemployment - right now the unemployment rate in the UK and the US is very low and there's no sign of it moving up so at this point we're confident about the credit quality of our credit card portfolio.

"If you look at overall unsecured indebtedness in the UK - while it's gone back to the levels that we saw pre-crisis as a percentage of GDP it's still down quite a bit. It's about 15% of GDP which we think is a very manageable number. I don't think there are signs of unsecured borrowing reaching a level in the UK that would cause concern."

He said he would not speculate on one of the major clouds still hanging over Barclays from the pre-financial crisis period - charges it faces from the US Department of Justice for the alleged mis-selling of mortgage-backed securities to investors.

The bank, unlike many of its competitors on Wall Street and in Europe, has refused so far to settle with the DoJ on the grounds that it was being asked to pay too much in fines.

Mr Staley went on: "We're looking for a settlement that was commensurate with what was made with the US banks and that did not happen."

He said that, despite the rise in profits from the bank's investment banking division, he did not expect a row over bankers bonuses this year: "For the third year in a row, our investment banking revenues were up, and our bonus pool in investment banking was down."