Lloyds said to place traders in glass box for ring-fencing

Lloyds Banking Group is taking new rules to isolate its trading operations literally. Some traders will soon be physically separated from their colleagues and placed in a glass box to comply, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

About 120 staff at the Lloyds Bank Corporate Markets division, which includes foreign exchange and rates, will be put in the partitioned rooms to be finished over the next three to four weeks, said the people who asked not to be identified. A spokesman for the bank declined to comment.

The ring-fencing rules, formulated after the financial crisis, require U.K. lenders to shield core services, such as checking and savings accounts, from riskier banking activities by 2019. Lloyds, which took about £20 billion ($28 billion) of UK taxpayers’ money to prevent its collapse almost a decade ago, has some 1,500 people working at 10 Gresham Street in the City of London where the split will be made, one person said.


Britain’s biggest mortgage lender has an estimated £500 million of expenses related to the new rules, while banks with large investment banks may face even greater costs. HSBC Holdings has forecast expenses of as much as £2 billion, while Barclays has said that “structural reform costs” will be up to £500 million in 2017 and 2018.