Anderson says such employees tend to be very valuable to earlier stage fintech companies as they “are aware of what it is like to work in a regulated industry and what the requirements are”.
She estimates there are currently 237 fintech companies in Scotland, of which around 42 per cent are in what she defines as the start-up phase.
One such fintech company is Seccl, the current chief executive of which is Dave Ferguson, previously one of the founders of the Nucleus platform.
He says that while Seccl did not start in Edinburgh, he runs the company from there. “There is no reason why Seccl could not have started in Edinburgh. There is a good ecosystem of potential customers in Scotland and outside of Scotland,” notes Ferguson.
Seccl provides back-office technology that allows advice firms and others to create their own white label platform, and Ferguson says that while he is based in Edinburgh, the head office is in Bath, rather than London, and he sees no problem with the business growing from there.
The financial backer of the Seccl business is Octopus, which is based in England.
As some of the traditional names that dominated the skyline of Edinburgh recede from prominence, the multi-nationals, which to a large extent ate their lunch, have also been increasing their presence in Edinburgh, with JPMorgan opening a technology facility in the city, and BlackRock recently announcing the creation of 500 new jobs.
Those jobs have been created based on back-office technology, rather than predominantly customer-facing roles.
Evolution
Ferguson says the evolution has involved “Edinburgh being the font office for a lot of firms, and the back office being in Glasgow or another Scottish city”.
Deloitte recently announced it was relocating its fintech laboratories out of London and into Edinburgh and Glasgow.
Asset management firm Abrdn has announced it is forming a partnership with the University of Edinburgh in the area of artificial intelligence.
The aim is to create an AI tool that enhances the research capability of the asset manager, and the capacity to look at a wider range of potential securities.
Morningstar Direct managing director Mark Sanderson says: “We are not prisoners of geography up here [in Scotland]. Our clients are up and down the country and some of the providers we use are up and down the country, but we can work with them all without any difficulty.”
