Bristol and the West of England are being promoted as a financial services hotspot capable of attracting major international investment while also playing a lead role in the UK’s emerging financial technology (fintech) industry.
The area is being showcased as one of nine UK ‘financial centres of excellence’ by the Government as it looks to overcome the perception that the strength of the country’s world-beating financial services is limited to just the City of London. 
UK Trade & Investment – the Government’s trade promotion organisation – and the West of England Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP) launched the South West centre of excellence last week by highlighting its strengths to an invited audience of sector representatives.
Some 35,000 people in Bristol are employed in financial services and the sector accounts for just under 10% of all economic activity in the city – the third highest of any region across the UK.
Across the South West region as a whole the sector contributes £12.6bn to the economy while more than 162,000 people rely on it for their job.
Lynsey Duffield, business development director at TheCityUK – the body promoting UK financial services – told the launch at Bank of Ireland’s Temple Quay headquarters that regions such as the West of England had a vital role to play in driving innovation in the industry.
Bristol and the West, with its strong tech cluster, could help develop the UK fintech industry, she said. The city is home to Momentum Financial Technology, which was founded out of the acquisition of Bristol-based Blue Speck Financial by insurance giant MMI Holdings.
The company behind Moneyhub – an award-winning financial dashboard product – and YourWealth.co.uk, a personal financial information website – operates a 120-person fintech lab in Bristol.
The area is also a major centre for the rapidly growing ethical banking and investment market with Triodos Bank and Rathbone Greenbank based in Bristol.
West of England LEP chair Stephen Robertson – who is also a non-executive director of Bristol-based investment firm Hargreaves Lansdown – said the area enjoyed three major advantages which made it more attractive to inward investors than other regions.
It enjoyed a proud heritage as a financial centre dating back many hundreds of years and had attracted major players such as Lloyds Bank, which moved its back office to Bristol from London in the 1990s and now employs 3,700 people in the city. Aviva, which has been in Bristol since 1970 under various names, employs 2,000 people in the region.
It had a very skilled workforce and a huge talent pool, especially among the 100,000 students in its five universities – many of whom were likely to stay in the region after graduation because of the high quality of life.
And it had a tech ecosystem that encouraged innovation in new products that could revolutionise the finance sector as well as being a magnet for talent in areas such as cyber security and big data.
Added to these were the lower operating costs and its excellent connections to London, the rest of the UK and the world.
