While London and New York have often competed with each other as financial centres to attract international business, this year that may be changing, the Financial Times reports.
The cities have begun a dialogue to help the world’s largest financial groups do business more efficiently in both places.
Roel Campos, a commissioner at the US Securities and Exchange Commission, says, “I think we are at a unique moment in time, and that is that regulators as well as private sector players realise it’s important to make progress towards several objectives that would help trans-border commerce in financial services.”
Citigroup, which operates globally, chafes at having to deal with more than 40 regulators where it does business. Edward Greene, general counsel for markets and banking, says that while the capital markets of the US and Europe are the most developed, they are also the most regulated, with “a multitude of conflicts between securities regulations that artificially separate those two markets.”
He adds, “The challenge is not so much US competitiveness versus somewhere else but rather: why can’t we blend and make seamless the two most powerful markets?”
James Leigh-Pemberton, a managing director at Credit Suisse, says investors on both sides of the Atlantic are more interested than ever in making cross-border equity investments. Yet such investments “continue to be impeded by various local requirements.” The investment community is “feverishly working around regulatory strictures in a manner that imposes greater costs than necessary.”