The London-Brussels nexus: Does EU Regulation drag the City Down?

Participants to the event included:

Andrew Hilton, Director, Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation (London)
Bernhard Speyer, Deputy Head of Deutsche Bank Research (Frankfurt)
Nick Collier, Head of EMEA Government Relations, Thomson Reuters (London)

The event was moderated by Nicolas Véron, Senior Fellow, Bruegel.

For a number of years London has thrived as Europe’s dominant financial hub and a major global financial centre. But the tide may now be turning. The financial crisis has dented public support for financial services in Britain, and a cycle of re-regulation is taking place on both sides of the Channel. With the regulatory and supervisory environment increasingly determined by decisions taken at the EU level, many players in the City are especially concerned that policy moves in Brussels could change the rules of the game and jeopardise established business models.

Is the City at risk of losing its competitive edge, to continental European countries, to rising players in other areas of the world, or both? Is relocation of financial activities outside the UK already happening? Which risks are real and which ones are imaginary? And what are the key choices for EU regulation in terms of impact on business in the City?

Andrew Hilton is director of CSFI, a London-based think-tank supported by 65 City institutions that he co-founded in 1993. He also heads a small economic and financial consulting firm in London. He has worked as an economist at the World Bank in Washington and has run a financial advisory service for the Financial Times in New York. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, an MBA from Wharton and an MA from New College, Oxford.

Bernhard Speyer has been the deputy head of DB Research since November 2010 and the head of its Banking, Financial Markets and Regulation department since 2001, after joining Deutsche Bank in 1998 as a senior economist. Before that, he was a lecturer at the Economics Department of Freie Universität Berlin from 1993 to 1997. A banker by training, he studied economics at the University of Leicester and the Freie Universität Berlin, where he earned his PhD.

Nick Collier joined Thomson Reuters in March 2011. Previously, he held senior government relations positions at Morgan Stanley (2007-11), the International Capital Market Association (2006-07), Instinet (2001-06), and the International Swaps and Derivatives Association (1999-2001). He started his career at the Bank of England and was the UK financial attaché to the EU in the 1990s. He holds a MSC in Economics and Finance from the London School of Economics.