A SENIOR boss at JP Morgan has said initial job losses at the bank from Brexit will be “in the hundreds” – but the impact could be “significantly larger” in the years ahead.

Mark Garvin, vice-chairman of its corporate and investment bank, insisted his figures were not inconsistent with earlier warnings that up to 4,000 UK jobs could go.

Mr Garvin told the House of Commons treasury select committee that JP Morgan was in an “advanced state of preparation” for the “worst case scenario” of a no-deal or “disorderly” Brexit.

He said: “We are in very advanced stages of execution in fact and a number of these initiatives are already in flight and in many cases we’ve passed the point of return. They’re happening. Our intention is to migrate our commercial banking and to merge our wealth management business, EU-focused businesses, into our Luxembourg bank.”

Asked about the potential job losses, he said: “We employ 16,000 people in this country. Four thousand of those are in Bournemouth and 2,000 in Scotland and the remainder in London. We have 2,200 people in the rest of the EU 27.

“The number of staff that we estimate would be required during the first couple of years as we staff up these operations, the jobs we’re looking at is in the hundreds so you’re quite right these are not large numbers speaking for JP Morgan.”

But he said he did not know the final scale of the move abroad. It depended on several factors including regulators, policy changes and digitisation in the industry.

“So what we do know is these are the numbers today but it would be difficult to speculate what they might be in the future and one could envisage a scenario where those were substantially larger,” he added.

He was asked by committee member Catherine McKinnell MP about the warnings JP Morgan chairman Jamie Dimon made during the 2016 referendum campaign that 4,000 jobs could go from the bank’s UK operation.

The claims were made during a visit to Bournemouth with then-chancellor George Osborne.

Mr Garvin said: “I think the two numbers are not inconsistent. It’s a matter of time.”

He added: “The numbers I mentioned in the hundreds are in the short-term horizon which we can envisage to get us through March.

“We just don’t know what will happen in the future and as I said at the outset, the evolution of our staff count and of our activities will be very much a function of the ultimate deal that is secured between this country and the UK, the ultimate settlement that’s arrived at, and of regulatory decision in the EU 27 as well as this country.

He said: “There is clearly a scenario where actually one does envisage that kind of outcome but that is not a forecast, that is a scenario.

“It’s a scenario that could be mitigated by a series of arrangements.”