Financial Services

Finance Birmingham | Financial Shared Service Centres | Birmingham's Financial District.

The financial services sector is going through considerable change. Being at the heart of recent economic turmoil, banks and financial services companies are increasingly looking to optimize their operations. In a UK context this involves moving back and middle office operations out of London to more cost competitive locations.

Birmingham is well positioned to deliver reduced costs and smarter, more efficient ways of doing business. Greater Birmingham is home to a significant pool of skilled labour in a financial and business services workforce of more than 242,000 employed across a wide range of activities over 24,000 businesses. Home to significant numbers of regional and national HQ’s, and over 40 UK and International Shared Services Centres.

The city offers the perfect environment to streamline and reinvent services such as compliance, risk management, as well as operations, technology, human resources and marketing.

Birmingham Advantage

Drawing on a long history of commercial activity, Birmingham is well positioned to deliver reduced costs and smarter, more efficient ways of doing business.

Over the past twenty years, Birmingham’s vision to become a leading European business centre has prompted an influx of businesses to relocate to the city, capitalising on high-quality office stock, a talent pool of 97,000 graduates each year from the wider Birmingham area and an advantageous central location.

The financial and business services sector contributes £23 billion to the West Midlands region. It provides financial companies with key advantages such as:

A large labour pool from which to recruit staff
Lower tightness in labour market than other UK cities
Good general business environment for future potential foreign investors
Wide choice of office real estate available – Birmingham has more standing office space available than any other UK city

Leading the drive

A number of financial operations are leading the drive to improve operational efficiency through new and flexible working practices. Deutsche Bank joins a comprehensive range of banking and financial services within the West Midlands: the generalist providers include all the key four British banks (Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and RBS-NatWest).

The mid-tier providers are among others AIB, Bank of Ireland and NAB/Yorkshire Bank.

Investment banks and specialist providers, meanwhile, include NM Rothshild & Co, Islamic Bank of Britain, Arbuthnot Banking, Goldman Sachs & Co and Unity Trust Bank.

Testimonials to success

''Birmingham offers a business friendly and supportive community. It has good telecoms facilities which helps with the international operations''

Jason Ang, Vice President, Deutsche Bank

''The 2nd largest office of PWC was located in Birmingham because of the good access to graduates and the cost-effective way of supplying services to global operations''.