Lord Mayor of London praises Australia’s “flourishing” fintech scene, plugs support for new ‘bridge’
In a rare visit to Australia last week, the Lord Mayor of London, Alderman Charles Bowman, expressed his full support for the upcoming fintech ‘bridge’ between Australia and UK and praised the local fintech scene as being almost on par with renowned fintech hub London.
Speaking to a packed room at co-working and tech startup space York Butter Factory in Melbourne on February 15, Bowman discussed how Australia is the UK’s fifth largest trade partner, but there was always room to explore new channels of trade. Bowman and his cohort were in Australia in the wake of Britain’s controversial Brexit vote to explore new partnerships and strengthen existing ones.
Some of the channels Bowman discussed as potential areas in which Australia could help UK businesses, and vice versa, were in the areas of asset management, green finance, and “very particularly”, in the fintech sector.
On the latter, the Lord Mayor says the Australian fintech sector is “flourishing”, following a successful doubling of the number of fintech companies locally in the past two years to well over 700, he said.
“We have fundamentals in the UK that are pretty hard to replicate. Rule of Law, history, culture, education, regulation, taxation, innovation, infrastructure, language, and a great place to work,” he said.
“Interestingly enough, a lot of which you also see here.”
This means there’s a great opportunity for partnership, says Bowman, which will “no doubt be an exciting time for UK-Australian business relations”. One such relationship was announced in November last year, with the government announcing plans for a fintech ‘bridge’ between Australia and the UK to better enable collaboration and investment between the two countries’ fintech companies.
To read more, please click on the link below…
