The benefits of a new agenda for our financial services industry

What a tremendous crowd we had to our Industry Forum roundtable on 'A new agenda for financial services'. This was hosted by Edelman and we were welcomed to their London offices by Jonathan Mitchell, Senior Vice President, Public and Government Affairs at Edelman. The turnout shows the enthusiasm of the UK financial sector to engage with the government on getting the country growing again. This enthusiasm was shared by our speaker, Lord David Pitt-Watson, recently appointed Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury, after a successful career in fund management and, latterly, in academia. The government has made clear its ambitions for economic growth and the importance it attaches to trade and re-industrialisation. Furthermore, it is committed to fiscal discipline, despite the constraints this imposes. To tease out bottlenecks in the economy and identify opportunities as they arise it needs to work closely with individual sectors. Many issues, such as the lack of intelligent risk capital, and the scale-up investment gap, are longstanding but deserve a second look, especially as the UK offers relative stability and freedom from the arbitrary interventions that can affect other financial centres. We couldn’t solve all the UK’s financial problems at this short meeting, but we look forward to holding more meetings, and being able to help answer the Government's call for the UK financial sector to help the UK economy gain momentum.