June 12, 2025 • 12 mins
London has long prided itself on being a global tech hub, promoting the image of a thriving and ambitious capital for innovation. But that reputation is beginning to slip. Major UK fintech firms like Revolut and Wise are shifting their focus—and listings—to the US, drawn by stronger valuations, deeper market liquidity and better access to compute infrastructure.
As more companies look across the Atlantic, can London live up to the tech center image it projects? In this week’s episode of In the City, host Francine Lacqua speaks with Bloomberg editor Amy Thomson to explore whether London is keeping pace or simply masking its decline.
Read more:
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2025-european-startups-to-watch/
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Welcome to in the City.
Each week we unpack a story that's crucial to the
world's financial capitals and Francin Lacua Now. London has long
(00:26):
prided itself on being a global tech hub, but that
reputation is starting to falter. Revolute, for example, is considering
a listing in New York, pointing to low valuations and
limited liquidity in the UK market. Meanwhile, Wise, the twelve
billion pound money transfer company is shifting its primary listing
to the US. So these developments are flashing warning signs
(00:47):
for British lawmakers, but also raising serious questions about London's
ambitions as a tech capital. Welcome to the City of London,
The City of the City.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
The City of London Bank. We need mind the gap
between the tram and the financial hearts of the country,
the City, the City.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Welcome to in the City, stand care of the doors.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
In this episode, we'll dig into what's behind the shift
and why some of the UK's leading fintech firms are
turning away from London while the city keeps pushing this
image of itself as a booming tech capital. Well to
help us unpack it all. I'm delighted to be joined
by Amy Thompson, Bloomberg's tech team leader for ea AM.
I'm so happy you're here to make sense of all
of this.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
How's the UK doing. We're in the middle of London
Tech Week. Last week for the first time we had
south By Southwest who had pretty cool speakers. It generated
a little bit of a buzz. But is it attracting money?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I mean, London as a tech hub in Europe is
still the biggest. It's still where you should be if
you're startup or scale up in Europe. So where the
venture capital money is, where the private equity capital is
so yes. But as far as tech conferences go, there
is the long standing rivalry between London Tech Week and
Viva Tech, which kicks off on Thursday. So I think
(02:14):
it'll be interesting to compare the buzz between the two.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
This year I moderated a couple things at south By
Southwest and people are saying, where are you from? Are
you from London? Is there a correlation between like conferences
and attracting money or is it just because people like
to come to London because London has a good infrastructure
and again, it creates a buzz, but there's not necessarily
capital being deployed on the back of that.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Oh that's tricky. I mean, I think the London conferences
will have the Like you said, the big London vidtechs
more likely to show up. But for what it's worth,
Viva Tech seems to be the buzzier, the buzzier show.
I think they had Elon Musks show up last year.
Jensen Wang heereed at London Tech Week on Monday, but
he's going to be at Viva Tech again on Thursday,
and that's where Nvidia is also having it's its own
(02:56):
meeting on the sidelines. We've got a lot of Open
Eye executives going to VivaTech, so that seems to be
drawing more of the international crowd.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Is it a good bad thing that Elon Musk doesn't
come to London. He's been so vocally against UK regulations
some of the things that the UK has been doing,
also for hate messages online. I mean he's a little
bit obsessed with the UK.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, a lot of the online safety legislation that's come
out in the UK has made x for example, pretty vulnerable.
But that said, he's no fan of European regulations either.
So I'd like to think we're equally in the doghouse
when it comes to Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
You mentioned the Nvidia CEO. He's the person at the
moment that everybody wants to speak to. He was on
stage with Cure Starmer on Monday and London Tech Week.
Were we expecting a bit of money being put to
a lot of projects.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Yeah, we had all sorts of conspiracy theories ahead of
Jensen's adherence. Don't think that money was on skills up.
I think maybe we're hoping for an enormous data center
or something like that. But you know, his interest in
the UK is nice, he called us. I think gordilux
circumstance between these two ideas that you're rich with great
(04:06):
computer scientists.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
It's a fantastic place for vcs to invest. The ecosystem
is really perfect for takeoff.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
We've got the companies, we've got the people, we've got
the universities, just don't have the compute. And then Cure
Starmer announced that the country would be spending an additional
one billion pounds on Compute.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Our ambition that we are determined to be the best
state partner for tech entrepreneurs anywhere in the world. That's
the bar, that's the ambition that I've set for my government,
and so on that front, I can announce today also
that we're committing an extra one billion pounds worth of
funding to scale up our compute power by a factor
(04:51):
of twenty. Now, you know how important that.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I don't know if this is fair, but I couldn't
help but think at the moment of the five hundred
billion that the US was just talking about, or you know,
the UAE saying that it was going to build a
five gigawat data center, which could easily be in the
tens of billions, and who knows if we'll ever see
like those numbers realized. But a billion pounds at a
moment like this, I think that's a little deflated.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Is this government really committed to putting tech and AI
as a priority?
Speaker 3 (05:22):
I mean, it's hard to tell. We were talking a
little bit more about how the one billion AI pledge
sounds so much like the one billion semiconductor pledge under
the SUNet government, and how that felt very too little,
too late, and this feels very much the same. So
it is it is a problem of a government that
doesn't necessarily have a huge budget for this sort of thing,
(05:44):
doesn't have a lot of giant companies that are coming
to sort of pledge money to sort of placate a
Trump figure, for example, doesn't really have that kind of
pull trying to create an ecosystem around some of these companies.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
I mean, what makes actually a great center for tech
because you need the infrastructure, you need the power, you
need the programmers. At the moment, yeah, is also a
lot of money being spent without knowing yet who comes top, right,
So you can't really tell the winner. Will you have
a winner takes all in tech? You know, is there
a chance that they're based in London or does it
(06:19):
not matter?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
I mean, as far as the AI race is concerned,
I don't think the companies really care where they're based.
They just want to go where they can get the compute.
They want to go where they can get the investors,
and if that's the US, which it historically is, that's
where they'll go. Because it does feel like you're going
to have a couple of giant tech companies that are
going to dominate this race. It'll be Meta and Zuckerberg's
(06:43):
new brain trust, It'll be open Ai and Sam Altman.
It'll be a company that can get to a scale
where everybody needs to use it and everybody needs to
have it as part of its infrastructure. And if that
can happen in the US, that's where they're going to go.
I think the only people who really care where the
headquarters are a politicians to journalists. The companies themselves are
just going to follow the resources most likely, And as
(07:05):
far as London goes, I think a lot of people
would agree with the Nvidia CEO that we do have
amazing universities, an amazing talent, and really cool companies that
start here. But when they get to sort of the
scale up phase, or they're thinking about a listing, or
they're ready to get really really huge, a big tech
company buys them, or they move their headquarters to the US.
They've listed here, they move their listing to the US
(07:26):
just because that's where the investment.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Is the US. Is it just because they have more
liquid capital markets? So is it a problem of the
stock exchange and courses instead of a politicians problem?
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Yeah, there's definitely some of that. There was a really
interesting story that I was reading in Blueberg about what
happened to the IPO market and how that's affected Europe.
After COVID. There's a huge downswing in IPOs all over
the world, but particularly lately in Europe. And one of
the things we're arguing is that IPOs sort of get IPOs.
(07:58):
You have a lot of high profile listing thing that
attracts investors, That attracts people who are knowledgeable about your industry,
who are willing to take a bigger bet on it,
higher valuations, etc.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Etc.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
So if New York is getting all of the big
tech listings, that's where all the investors are going to
be paying attention. That's where people are going to be
willing to give you a higher evaluation for your company.
I mean, we've.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Spoken with chief executives that say, look, we like London,
but actually, if you're publicly listed, you have a lot
more scrutiny on a lot of things that even if
you're transparent and you're doing fine, you may not want
to put the spotlight on regulation, I imagine is a
big concern if you're listed here. Does Trump attract tech
IPOs to the US.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
I don't know if it's a Trump thing. It's just
historically the US has been where you go to list
if you're a tech company, because that's for the investor
base is I think there is definitely a conversation about
whether some companies are going to bother listing at all
these days, especially with the IPO market having been solo
for so long. There's a lot more private capital at
work now, so it's possible opening is massive and they're
(09:01):
not public, they haven't needed to go to the public markets,
so I think that might be the other side of
the argument. I don't really think that the regulations have
changed so much under Trump and under the new EU
administration that it would sway anybody one way or the other.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
If you don't want to go public, you're you know,
either get bought by private equity, or you get bought
by a big tech company, or you're flying solo in private.
Do you see a preference from chief executives or does
it really depend on the space you operate in.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
I think it depends on the space. You've had. Sort
of mid sized companies tend to get folded into the
bigger tech companies, like we've read about Qualcom buying one
of our London listed tech companies, Alpha Wave. They make
semiconductor technology that's particularly useful for AI and data centers,
which is really hot right now, and Qualcom's obviously been
interested in it. So you have sort of the big
tech coming and swooping in and buying you out. But
(09:50):
also there are huge pools of capital. You've got money
coming out of DAE for example, Saudi funds that are
just focused on AI and tech that are worth tens
of billions, so you know there's money to be had
and you can still keep control of your company and
not necessarily do a financial report every quarter.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Who's London's biggest rival for the tech scene? Definitely the US?
Or is there a European We talked a lot about
viv Tech in Paris. You were telling me also Germany
has some really cool startups, but are they big enough or.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Yeah, I mean, as far as buzz I guess we're talking.
The US and China are on a different scale. Who's
on the same playing field as London? I'd say probably
France and Germany are doing some really cool things in
tech right now. We just put out a list of
twenty five European startups with Founders Forum that went out
(10:40):
earlier this week and saw people from all over Europe,
but a lot of the concentration was UK, France and Germany.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
What are you most excited about. Is there a space
in tech that you think has been overlooked that is
crucial to getting it done.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I think one of the really interesting spaces for Europe
right now is defense tech. So if you look at
a company like Helsing, they're never going to go to
the US because part of their selling point is sovereignty
and that's become so important now because of the way
the geopolitics are changing in Europe. They're attracting a lot
of investment, a lot of interest. Their drones are used
(11:14):
in Ukraine. I think they have agreements with the German government.
So companies that can help Europe meet its goals of
becoming more independent, taking more control over their own defense
I think will be really really interesting to watch this year.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Amy, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Thanks very much, thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
For listening to this episode of In the City from Bloomberg.
This episode was hosted by me Francin Laquin. It was
produced by Summersaudi Mosses and and Tala Maddi. Brendan Francis
Newnham is our executive producer. Special thanks to Amy Thompson,
Please subscribe, write and review wherever you listen to podcasts.
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News. Welcome to in the City.
Each week we unpack a story that's crucial to the
world's financial capitals and Francin Lacua Now. London has long
(00:26):
prided itself on being a global tech hub, but that
reputation is starting to falter. Revolute, for example, is considering
a listing in New York, pointing to low valuations and
limited liquidity in the UK market. Meanwhile, Wise, the twelve
billion pound money transfer company is shifting its primary listing
to the US. So these developments are flashing warning signs
(00:47):
for British lawmakers, but also raising serious questions about London's
ambitions as a tech capital. Welcome to the City of London,
The City of the City.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
The City of London Bank. We need mind the gap
between the tram and the financial hearts of the country,
the City, the City.
Speaker 3 (01:12):
Welcome to in the City, stand care of the doors.
Speaker 1 (01:19):
In this episode, we'll dig into what's behind the shift
and why some of the UK's leading fintech firms are
turning away from London while the city keeps pushing this
image of itself as a booming tech capital. Well to
help us unpack it all. I'm delighted to be joined
by Amy Thompson, Bloomberg's tech team leader for ea AM.
I'm so happy you're here to make sense of all
of this.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
Hi, thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (01:40):
How's the UK doing. We're in the middle of London
Tech Week. Last week for the first time we had
south By Southwest who had pretty cool speakers. It generated
a little bit of a buzz. But is it attracting money?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
I mean, London as a tech hub in Europe is
still the biggest. It's still where you should be if
you're startup or scale up in Europe. So where the
venture capital money is, where the private equity capital is
so yes. But as far as tech conferences go, there
is the long standing rivalry between London Tech Week and
Viva Tech, which kicks off on Thursday. So I think
(02:14):
it'll be interesting to compare the buzz between the two.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
This year I moderated a couple things at south By
Southwest and people are saying, where are you from? Are
you from London? Is there a correlation between like conferences
and attracting money or is it just because people like
to come to London because London has a good infrastructure
and again, it creates a buzz, but there's not necessarily
capital being deployed on the back of that.
Speaker 3 (02:33):
Oh that's tricky. I mean, I think the London conferences
will have the Like you said, the big London vidtechs
more likely to show up. But for what it's worth,
Viva Tech seems to be the buzzier, the buzzier show.
I think they had Elon Musks show up last year.
Jensen Wang heereed at London Tech Week on Monday, but
he's going to be at Viva Tech again on Thursday,
and that's where Nvidia is also having it's its own
(02:56):
meeting on the sidelines. We've got a lot of Open
Eye executives going to VivaTech, so that seems to be
drawing more of the international crowd.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Is it a good bad thing that Elon Musk doesn't
come to London. He's been so vocally against UK regulations
some of the things that the UK has been doing,
also for hate messages online. I mean he's a little
bit obsessed with the UK.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Yeah, a lot of the online safety legislation that's come
out in the UK has made x for example, pretty vulnerable.
But that said, he's no fan of European regulations either.
So I'd like to think we're equally in the doghouse
when it comes to Elon Musk.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
You mentioned the Nvidia CEO. He's the person at the
moment that everybody wants to speak to. He was on
stage with Cure Starmer on Monday and London Tech Week.
Were we expecting a bit of money being put to
a lot of projects.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
Yeah, we had all sorts of conspiracy theories ahead of
Jensen's adherence. Don't think that money was on skills up.
I think maybe we're hoping for an enormous data center
or something like that. But you know, his interest in
the UK is nice, he called us. I think gordilux
circumstance between these two ideas that you're rich with great
(04:06):
computer scientists.
Speaker 2 (04:08):
It's a fantastic place for vcs to invest. The ecosystem
is really perfect for takeoff.
Speaker 3 (04:16):
We've got the companies, we've got the people, we've got
the universities, just don't have the compute. And then Cure
Starmer announced that the country would be spending an additional
one billion pounds on Compute.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Our ambition that we are determined to be the best
state partner for tech entrepreneurs anywhere in the world. That's
the bar, that's the ambition that I've set for my government,
and so on that front, I can announce today also
that we're committing an extra one billion pounds worth of
funding to scale up our compute power by a factor
(04:51):
of twenty. Now, you know how important that.
Speaker 3 (04:55):
I don't know if this is fair, but I couldn't
help but think at the moment of the five hundred
billion that the US was just talking about, or you know,
the UAE saying that it was going to build a
five gigawat data center, which could easily be in the
tens of billions, and who knows if we'll ever see
like those numbers realized. But a billion pounds at a
moment like this, I think that's a little deflated.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
Is this government really committed to putting tech and AI
as a priority?
Speaker 3 (05:22):
I mean, it's hard to tell. We were talking a
little bit more about how the one billion AI pledge
sounds so much like the one billion semiconductor pledge under
the SUNet government, and how that felt very too little,
too late, and this feels very much the same. So
it is it is a problem of a government that
doesn't necessarily have a huge budget for this sort of thing,
(05:44):
doesn't have a lot of giant companies that are coming
to sort of pledge money to sort of placate a
Trump figure, for example, doesn't really have that kind of
pull trying to create an ecosystem around some of these companies.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
I mean, what makes actually a great center for tech
because you need the infrastructure, you need the power, you
need the programmers. At the moment, yeah, is also a
lot of money being spent without knowing yet who comes top, right,
So you can't really tell the winner. Will you have
a winner takes all in tech? You know, is there
a chance that they're based in London or does it
(06:19):
not matter?
Speaker 3 (06:20):
I mean, as far as the AI race is concerned,
I don't think the companies really care where they're based.
They just want to go where they can get the compute.
They want to go where they can get the investors,
and if that's the US, which it historically is, that's
where they'll go. Because it does feel like you're going
to have a couple of giant tech companies that are
going to dominate this race. It'll be Meta and Zuckerberg's
(06:43):
new brain trust, It'll be open Ai and Sam Altman.
It'll be a company that can get to a scale
where everybody needs to use it and everybody needs to
have it as part of its infrastructure. And if that
can happen in the US, that's where they're going to go.
I think the only people who really care where the
headquarters are a politicians to journalists. The companies themselves are
just going to follow the resources most likely, And as
(07:05):
far as London goes, I think a lot of people
would agree with the Nvidia CEO that we do have
amazing universities, an amazing talent, and really cool companies that
start here. But when they get to sort of the
scale up phase, or they're thinking about a listing, or
they're ready to get really really huge, a big tech
company buys them, or they move their headquarters to the US.
They've listed here, they move their listing to the US
(07:26):
just because that's where the investment.
Speaker 1 (07:28):
Is the US. Is it just because they have more
liquid capital markets? So is it a problem of the
stock exchange and courses instead of a politicians problem?
Speaker 3 (07:37):
Yeah, there's definitely some of that. There was a really
interesting story that I was reading in Blueberg about what
happened to the IPO market and how that's affected Europe.
After COVID. There's a huge downswing in IPOs all over
the world, but particularly lately in Europe. And one of
the things we're arguing is that IPOs sort of get IPOs.
(07:58):
You have a lot of high profile listing thing that
attracts investors, That attracts people who are knowledgeable about your industry,
who are willing to take a bigger bet on it,
higher valuations, etc.
Speaker 2 (08:08):
Etc.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
So if New York is getting all of the big
tech listings, that's where all the investors are going to
be paying attention. That's where people are going to be
willing to give you a higher evaluation for your company.
I mean, we've.
Speaker 1 (08:19):
Spoken with chief executives that say, look, we like London,
but actually, if you're publicly listed, you have a lot
more scrutiny on a lot of things that even if
you're transparent and you're doing fine, you may not want
to put the spotlight on regulation, I imagine is a
big concern if you're listed here. Does Trump attract tech
IPOs to the US.
Speaker 3 (08:38):
I don't know if it's a Trump thing. It's just
historically the US has been where you go to list
if you're a tech company, because that's for the investor
base is I think there is definitely a conversation about
whether some companies are going to bother listing at all
these days, especially with the IPO market having been solo
for so long. There's a lot more private capital at
work now, so it's possible opening is massive and they're
(09:01):
not public, they haven't needed to go to the public markets,
so I think that might be the other side of
the argument. I don't really think that the regulations have
changed so much under Trump and under the new EU
administration that it would sway anybody one way or the other.
Speaker 1 (09:16):
If you don't want to go public, you're you know,
either get bought by private equity, or you get bought
by a big tech company, or you're flying solo in private.
Do you see a preference from chief executives or does
it really depend on the space you operate in.
Speaker 3 (09:28):
I think it depends on the space. You've had. Sort
of mid sized companies tend to get folded into the
bigger tech companies, like we've read about Qualcom buying one
of our London listed tech companies, Alpha Wave. They make
semiconductor technology that's particularly useful for AI and data centers,
which is really hot right now, and Qualcom's obviously been
interested in it. So you have sort of the big
tech coming and swooping in and buying you out. But
(09:50):
also there are huge pools of capital. You've got money
coming out of DAE for example, Saudi funds that are
just focused on AI and tech that are worth tens
of billions, so you know there's money to be had
and you can still keep control of your company and
not necessarily do a financial report every quarter.
Speaker 1 (10:08):
Who's London's biggest rival for the tech scene? Definitely the US?
Or is there a European We talked a lot about
viv Tech in Paris. You were telling me also Germany
has some really cool startups, but are they big enough or.
Speaker 3 (10:20):
Yeah, I mean, as far as buzz I guess we're talking.
The US and China are on a different scale. Who's
on the same playing field as London? I'd say probably
France and Germany are doing some really cool things in
tech right now. We just put out a list of
twenty five European startups with Founders Forum that went out
(10:40):
earlier this week and saw people from all over Europe,
but a lot of the concentration was UK, France and Germany.
Speaker 1 (10:46):
What are you most excited about. Is there a space
in tech that you think has been overlooked that is
crucial to getting it done.
Speaker 2 (10:53):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:54):
I think one of the really interesting spaces for Europe
right now is defense tech. So if you look at
a company like Helsing, they're never going to go to
the US because part of their selling point is sovereignty
and that's become so important now because of the way
the geopolitics are changing in Europe. They're attracting a lot
of investment, a lot of interest. Their drones are used
(11:14):
in Ukraine. I think they have agreements with the German government.
So companies that can help Europe meet its goals of
becoming more independent, taking more control over their own defense
I think will be really really interesting to watch this year.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Amy, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 3 (11:30):
Thanks very much, thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:36):
For listening to this episode of In the City from Bloomberg.
This episode was hosted by me Francin Laquin. It was
produced by Summersaudi Mosses and and Tala Maddi. Brendan Francis
Newnham is our executive producer. Special thanks to Amy Thompson,
Please subscribe, write and review wherever you listen to podcasts.
Host
Francine Lacqua
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