Banking giant Standard Chartered: ‘Dublin came close’ as post-Brexit EU base

International banking giant Standard Chartered has said it heavily considered Dublin as its post-Brexit EU base before selecting Frankfurt, in what was “a very close call”.

The financial services group’s chief executive Bill Winters made the comments after saying the business will need to spend around $20m (€17m) making Frankfurt its European base in order to secure market access to the EU when Britain leaves the bloc.

Mr Winters said one of the deciding factors was Ireland’s credit rating, which is below Germany’s AAA status. “It would’ve been easy to set up there [Dublin] also. But at the end of the day it involved an interesting issue around the country’s credit rating. We felt large institutional investors would prefer Germany.”