Early next year, HSBC's traders will become among the first employees to leave the bank's current Canary Wharf headquarters, and they may be in for a surprise when they move into the new base in the historic City of London.
After working for decades on a trading floor custom-built for HSBC with double-height ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows, staff will soon find their new working environment is far more cramped.
The current office building has a floor height of about 6 meters (19.7 feet), providing ample room for equipment hidden beneath the floor and large screens suspended from the ceiling.
Planning documents show that the new headquarters, Panorama St Paul's, has a floor height of only 3.5 meters. The building, previously used by BT Group, is currently undergoing extensive refurbishment.
Once the raised flooring installed to conceal equipment is taken into account, the actual clear height from floor to ceiling in most areas will be just 2.6 meters.
Trading floors require substantial cooling and power infrastructure, so by design their floor heights are typically significantly greater than those of ordinary office spaces.
Jan-Philip Wesenberg, managing director of SFI Logistics, which helps install equipment on trading floors, said that higher ceilings alone do not deliver better cooling, but greater floor height gives engineers more space to route air conditioning, power and data lines beneath the floor and within the ceiling.
In smaller spaces, accommodating these facilities within a dense trading floor layout becomes even more challenging.
According to a person familiar with the matter, when HSBC decided to move its headquarters from Canary Wharf to the City of London, senior management had already been alerted to this issue.
A spokesperson for HSBC said the bank very much looks forward to moving to Panorama St Paul's in early 2027.
The new headquarters will provide redesigned, modern workspaces, including a refurbished trading floor equipped with state-of-the-art facilities, located in the heart of the City of London.
Windows of HSBC Holdings' new office building.