Trading giant Jane Street seeks to double London office footprint

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Jane Street is seeking to double its London office space, as the trading firm rides a period of explosive growth that has established it as a challenger to the world’s biggest banks.

The firm has been in talks with landlords about increasing its City of London office space to 400,000-500,000 square feet in the next few years, according to people familiar with the matter.

The New York-based group currently occupies about 235,000 sq ft at 2½ Devonshire Square near Liverpool Street. It has already increased its space there once since moving in five years ago, upsizing from 70 per cent occupancy to take the whole building in 2022.

Earlier this year Jane Street agreed to expand its New York office to roughly 1mn sq ft.

A 500,000 sq ft London office would be close to the size of HSBC’s new global headquarters at St Paul’s — which is around 550,000 sq ft — although that is now thought to be too small for the bank.

Jane Street is one of the world’s best known trading firms, along with other industry giants such as Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities and Jeff Yass’s Susquehanna. The firm makes markets in assets including exchange traded funds, equities and bonds; buying and selling securities at high speeds for often small profits in each trade.

The firm was relatively unknown for much of the 2010s, but its revenues and profits exploded during the Covid-19 pandemic as market volatility jumped and demand for its trading services surged.

It made net trading revenues of $8.4bn in the first half of last year, on a par with the biggest Wall Street banks, and has expanded to more than 2,600 employees across offices including London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Rival hedge fund Citadel and its sister firm, market maker and direct competitor Citadel Securities, have agreed to lease at least 250,000 sq ft at British Land’s 2 Finsbury Avenue skyscraper nearby at Broadgate when it completes in 2027 — a two-thirds expansion of Citadel’s London presence.

Citadel has options to expand its office by up to 130,000 sq ft, which agents expect they are likely to exercise.

Jane Street has considered a move to the Dovetail Building, a new 23-storey tower with roughly 465,000 sq ft of office space, which is being developed for completion in 2029.

The trading firm is also potentially looking at the former Deutsche Bank headquarters on London Wall and other options in the City, one of the people said, adding that no decision had been made.

Relatively few large buildings suitable for big financial businesses are set to be delivered in the City over the coming years, because of a pause on new developments getting started during Covid-19 and the recent period of high interest rates and construction costs.

Jane Street did not respond to a request for comment.