The Lord Mayor of the City of London has praised Leeds as “an incredibly vibrant, exciting place to do business” and backed the region to attract new investment as financial firms look outside the capital for cost-effective services.
Alderman Roger Gifford, an ambassador for the UK’s financial services industry, visited the city on a fact-finding mission and met with industry leaders. He said: “There are no doubts in anyone’s minds that there are complementary offerings between London and Leeds.
“The question is, how do they look? How do we formulate it? How do we make two plus two equal five?
“How do we differentiate between the great big City of London with all its international global connections, head offices and the like and what Leeds has, particularly in legal and financial services?”
He said City firms are aware of “huge” services provided by the 40,000 people who work in the financial industry in Leeds.
City firms are also aware of the expertise that Leeds has in legal services, he added.
“How do we gear up on those to everybody’s advantage?
“The reason for coming here is because a good Leeds offering adds to the London offering which adds to the UK offering.”
Mr Gifford, who works for Swedish bank SEB, took up the role in November. He will spend 90 days travelling abroad promoting the UK’s financial services sector during his year in office.
Mr Gifford is expected to make around 800 speeches during the term.
He said the UK is home to 250 foreign banks, including Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, JP Morgan, which together employ 150,000 people mainly outside London.
Mr Gifford added: “All the big guys have huge operations, European operations, global operations outside London.
“You don’t put them in France because they don’t speak English well enough. You might put them somewhere like Latvia or Luxemburg because their English is much better so we want to make sure they stay in the UK.”
He said Yorkshire has an opportunity through ‘reshoring’ of financial services from London to cheaper parts of the UK.
“Yorkshire clearly has a conglomeration of people doing banking services.
“There are other parts of the country doing good work in custody support or asset management support but there will be different reasons... why different places are attractive.”
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