International bank executives no longer take UK for granted

A report published by UK Finance and the law firm Norton Rose Fulbright on 22 September 2026 says that several senior executives at international banks would no longer automatically choose the UK as the central base for their European or global operations. The finding comes from detailed interviews with senior executives at 14 non-UK-headquartered banks; several of them said that, deciding today, they would not automatically pick the UK.

That matters because the 14 banks interviewed employ around 35,000 people in the UK, and because the report lands five weeks before a Budget in which the financial sector's tax treatment is already under discussion. HM Treasury confirmed on 31 July 2026 that the Autumn Budget will take place on 28 October 2026, and UK Finance has used the same week to publish its own submission asking the government not to raise bank-specific taxes.

It is worth being precise about what the report does and does not say. It does not claim that international banks are planning to leave London, and it does not put a number on jobs or investment that has already moved elsewhere. It describes a change in mindset: the UK is now one option among several being actively weighed, rather than the place banks end up by default.

What the report actually found

UK Finance's international-bank membership runs to nearly 60 non-UK-headquartered banks, which the trade body says contributed broader expertise to the report. But the headline finding rests on something narrower: detailed interviews with executives from 14 of those banks, headquartered across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Neither UK Finance nor Norton Rose Fulbright has published how many of the 14 executives expressed that view, what questions they were asked, or which banks they represent. That leaves the finding informative as a warning signal from senior bank executives whose views concern capital and staffing decisions, but it falls well short of a representative survey of international banking in the UK. Nearly 60 banks are members; only 14 were interviewed in depth, and their answers have not been broken down.

A warning signal, not a measured decline

The Financial Times reported the same distinction, in an article syndicated by Yahoo Finance: the concern is about where future capital, risk-booking and teams might go, not about banks shutting existing London operations. That framing is consistent with the report itself, which focuses on incremental decisions rather than an announced withdrawal.

Independent data give a mixed picture rather than confirming a slide. HM Treasury's own Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy, published on 21 July 2025, said the sector had not grown as a whole in real terms since 2010 — a stagnation finding from government, not from an industry lobby group. Meanwhile, KPMG recorded a sharp fall in UK fintech investment in the first half of 2026, discussed below, but also found the UK still leads Europe on the same measure. The evidence supports both continued relative strength and areas of deterioration at once, and the report should be read that way rather than as proof of one trend or the other.

Why the UK still wins business

The report itself lists the UK's continuing attractions: deep capital markets, specialist talent, legal certainty, regulatory expertise, international connectivity and the UK time zone. These are qualitative judgements shared by the banks interviewed and echoed in the government's own competitiveness strategy, though neither source puts a number on how much each factor is worth.

On fintech specifically, KPMG's data show the UK still converts those strengths into deal activity. Despite a steep fall in funding, the UK remained Europe's largest fintech investment market in the first half of 2026 and ranked second globally by deal count, behind only the US.

Where the pressure is building

The frictions identified in the interviews are operating costs, cumulative taxation, regulatory complexity, post-Brexit market-access barriers, mobility difficulties for staff moving between jurisdictions, and slow delivery of policy on innovation. These are reported concerns and a plausible mechanism for marginal investment decisions, but the report does not quantify how much investment, if any, they have already diverted. UK Finance is the banking trade body behind the report, and its recommendations overlap with the tax submission it has lobbied for ahead of the Budget, which is worth bearing in mind when weighing the strength of the claim. Norton Rose Fulbright collaborated on the report as the law firm that carried out the interviews.

The trade body's case for the Budget

UK Finance's six policy priorities cover openness to international banking, a predictable tax environment, talent and mobility, capital markets and innovation, delivery of existing competitiveness commitments, and international market access and alignment. These are UK Finance's recommendations, not conclusions that follow automatically from the interview evidence. The interviews describe perceived pressures; they do not provide a counterfactual showing that adopting any specific proposal would preserve a stated number of jobs or amount of investment.

Alongside the report, UK Finance published PwC's modelled 2026 tax rates, effective from 1 January 2026, for a hypothetical corporate and investment bank in five financial centres; UK Finance published the modelling on 23 September 2026:

This is a commissioned model of one hypothetical bank, not a measured effective tax rate paid by any actual institution, and the report itself acknowledges that tax is only one of several factors in a location decision. The comparison illustrates UK Finance's argument for the Budget; it does not demonstrate that the tax differential has caused a specific amount of business to move.

What this could mean for fintech

A weaker international-banking base in the UK could, in principle, reduce the demand, partnerships, specialist expertise and later-stage capital available to UK fintech firms. That link is plausible but unquantified in the September 2026 report, and fintech funding also responds to global fundraising conditions, interest rates and the timing of individual large deals, so any softening should not be attributed to banking competitiveness alone.

The scale of what is already visible is stark. KPMG recorded £1.8bn of UK fintech investment across 205 merger and acquisition, private-equity and venture-capital deals in the first half of 2026, down from £5.0bn across 281 deals in the same period of 2025 — a fall KPMG itself describes as two-thirds. The UK's share of fintech investment across Europe, the Middle East and Africa fell to 22% in the first half of 2026, compared with 68% at the end of 2025, though the two periods are not directly comparable, one being a half-year figure and the other a year-end one. Even so, the UK retained its position as Europe's leading fintech market by that measure.

Jobs beyond the City

The location decisions of international banks matter well beyond London. Skills England, using Office for National Statistics Annual Population Survey data, estimated UK financial-services employment at 1,364,000 people in 2025, with around 60% of those jobs outside London. HM Treasury's 2025 strategy used a different, earlier estimate of 1.2 million; the gap may reflect differences in reference period or scope rather than growth, and the two figures should not be read as a simple year-on-year increase.

The 14 banks interviewed for the report employ roughly 35,000 people in the UK — a small fraction of the sector-wide total, and not a like-for-like market-share figure given the different populations being measured. No bank-by-bank plans for future UK hiring or job losses have been published, so there is no basis in the report for forecasting redundancies.

What government has already promised

The government has not been silent on competitiveness. The Financial Services and Markets Act 2023 received Royal Assent on 29 June 2023; the Prudential Regulation Authority's secondary statutory objective to facilitate the UK economy's international competitiveness and medium- to long-term growth, so far as reasonably possible and subject to alignment with international standards and its primary safety objectives, took effect on 29 August 2023. That is a mandate to weigh competitiveness, not a licence to loosen prudential standards. HM Treasury's 2025 strategy set out further reforms on regulation, market access and talent, which UK Finance's report suggests have not yet been delivered quickly enough for some international banks.

What to watch on 28 October

The immediate question is narrower than the report's headline suggests, and its answer is unknown before 28 October 2026. UK Finance has asked the Chancellor to avoid further bank-specific tax rises and to provide clearer tax and regulatory predictability; whether the Budget does either, and whether it also advances delivery of the government's existing competitiveness reforms, are both worth watching, rather than treating the absence of a tax rise alone as the test of success. Readers wanting the primary detail should follow HM Treasury's Budget publications directly, along with any subsequent implementation updates from the PRA and the Financial Conduct Authority, rather than relying on trade-body summaries alone.