international Powerhouse - london

LONDON REMAINS AN INTERNATIONAL POWERHOUSE

No other city can adapt to change quite as quickly as London

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in his prime the poet William Wordsworth stood on Westminster Bridge and marveled at this city. “Earth has not anything to show more fair,” he wrote. “Ships, towers, domes, theaters, and temples lie, open to the fields and to the sky”. Two hundred years later the dazzling vision he gazed upon is brighter than ever. London is Europe’s richest city. The home of banking. The tech centre. and London’s position as number one means it attracts elite talent from across the globe. Progressively, the more London outclasses rivals, the stronger it becomes.

A glance at the skyline tells the story. almost a hundred brand new skyscrapers puncture the horizon, up three-fold on the previous year. Londoners love to give these buildings catchy names: The Gherkin, The Cheesegrater, and The Walkie Talkie. Soon The Trellis will rise to become Europe’s second tallest building behind its neighbour, The Shard. Below ground, the new Crossrail 2 underground trainline is Europe’s biggest ever infrastructure project.

Companies in London also scale faster than anywhere in Europe. a good guide is the list of unicorns the city can boast. There are more unicorns in London than France, Germany and italy put together. There are incubators, accelerators, and co-working spaces to help start-ups climb the first rung of the ladder. as companies grow, vCs and private equity investors are ready to inject capital to propel them skyward. London is the fourth most invested city in the world for tech – as of 2019 – and companies in London thrive with the network and support levels that this accolade brings with it.

ZEDRA a global provider of active Wealth, Global Expansion and Fund Services recently published a report explaining why beyond 2021 and despite of Brexit and the Coronavirus pandemic London has all the attributes to become the epicentre of the world trade.

LONDON SUPPORTS SUCCESS

Whatever stage of the business journey your organisation is embarking on, you can be best positioned to succeed in London

From Idea to first Sale

Got an idea for a company? The city is dotted with more than 200 accelerators and incubators to nurture fragile concepts into reality. There is CyLon, for cyber security. For engineers there is the Enterprise Hub at the Royal academy of Engineering, offering grant funding. and of course, the Barclays accelerator which offers entrepreneurs unprecedented support in the world of finance and fintech. Schemes are constantly launching.

Enthusiastic Investors

Great ideas need sympathetic investors. Here London excels. The city is teeming with early stage investors. There are at least 17 angel networks where start-ups can find investment.

Spin Outs from Academia

Great ideas used to stay locked up in research labs. Not anymore. The UK is a pioneer at commercialising great ideas.

Fintech Ecosystem packs a punch

London’s fintech scene continues to flourish, as the city’s innovative culture helps starts-ups and incumbents succeed

Fintech is London’s trump card. it’s where the financial might of the City collides with the tech skills of the universities and private sector. The result is the world’s leading venue for fintech. across the city, every financial activity is being disrupted by fintechs. insurance, wealth management, personal investing, lending, payments... it’s all up for grabs and all being changed by London-based firms. in fact, between 2014 and 2018 London’s fintech sector received more than five times the investment of any other European city.7 That’s more venture capital than Paris, Frankfurt, Berlin and amsterdam combined.

A key reason is the regulator’s ability to both invigilate, and foster innovation. The Financial Conduct authority runs a sandbox – an experimental environment to test new ideas. To date more than 700 companies have been helped, accelerating time to market by 40 per cent. according to a survey of more than 2,000 people at the height of the coronavirus pandemic, 66% of people were regularly using financial technology between march and July 2020 – this is an increase of over 50% compared to 2019’s usage figures. Naturally, the rest of the world will one day enjoy the same benefits. But right now, it’s Londoners who get to enjoy the products they helped to develop.

Open Banking Driving Financial Innovation

Open Banking has been in force for almost three years and is catalysing major changes in UK finance and fintech a new force is blasting through the European financial system. Open Banking is forcing traditional banks to share customer data (with permission) with third-party service providers therefore changing the landscape of finance, and London is at the forefront.

Open Banking is making the UK attractive to american companies. Plaid, a San Francisco fintech company focussed on financial infrastructure, has opened a London office to serve its European expansion. Zach Perret, co-founder and chief executive of the company, has previously described the impact open banking has had on banks and fintechs as a “sea change”. 10 Plaid’s software helps to connect more than 15,000 US banks. Now European fintech companies can use Plaid’s service to connect to UK bank accounts it’s still early days for Open Banking, and the opportunities are still being explored. most recently Google has become the latest firm to move into banking by offering smart current accounts. Ultimately, it is this proximity, the laws, language and unique time zone that truly set London apart as the fintech capital of the world.

The World's Capital City

It’s not hard to see why organisations are choosing to set up a holding company in London for their international operations. The city provides practical reasons to call it home

First and foremost London is the gateway to the rest of the world with excellent transport links to Europe and asia. Organisations with a growing presence outside of North america often experience complications that come from having to operate in multiple different countries. Consolidating that presence in London is easier than it would be anywhere else. There are many practical reasons that a company might decide to locate a holding company in the UK’s capital. aside from the low corporate tax rate and the ability to exempt dividends from taxable income, a London based holding company will benefit from over 130 tax treaties with other countries, reducing the impact of withholding taxes and other barriers to cross-border trade.

As well as a pragmatic attitude to taxation, the UK also has a depth and substance that means international businesses can adapt to the changing global market, customer demands and new laws with relative ease. it is simply possible to Do more. achieve more. and with better people than anywhere else.

Value of Creative Capital

Despite its excellence in fintech, London’s rich cultural diversity means it is equally a leader in the creative industries it’s hardly unusual for a city to be bustling with creative spirits. The boulevards of Paris are teeming with portrait artists, and Dublin pubs throng with poets. London? it’s the place where creativity pays

VFX

Today the big earner is visual effects for the movie industry. Framestore is the biggest name in the city. Founded in 1986, the company hit the jackpot with the Harry Potter films, starting with the Philosopher’s Stone. Today Framestore employs 2,400 staff and has won 14 Emmys, and an academy award for best visual effects in The Golden Compass.

ADLAND

advertising is huge in London, with players like Bombora and amobee making waves in the city. in 2018 the capital won more Cannes Lions (Europe’s top awards for advertising) than any other European country. around 140,000 work in advertising in the London. The new frontier is digital advertising. The UK was the first country to spend more on digital than traditional ad media.

PLAYSTATIONS AND PCS

Computer games are another booming industry. There are 634 computer games companies in the capital, such as Curve Digital led by the man responsible for Lara Croft Tomb Raider, and 22 Cans whose games regularly feature in the apple app Store’s top games of the year. Behind the success is the conveyor belt of talent coming out of universities. London has six focussed on gaming, plus the Digital Schoolhouse, a specialist programme for children supported by Nintendo, PlayStation, and Sega. Top talent starts young in London.

To read the full report visit: www.zedra.com

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A TOKEN SALE

Christie’s once again leads the way with its first blockchain-backed digital-only artwork auction

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On 1 May 2007, Mike Winkelmann, aka the digital artist Beeple, posted a new work of art online. He did the same thing the next day and the next, and the next one after that, creating and posting a brand-new digital picture or ‘everyday’ as he called it, every single day for 13-and-a-half years. Now those individual pieces have been brought together in EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, a unique work in the history of digital art.

Minted exclusively for Christie’s, the monumental digital collage was recently sold as a single lot for $69 million . Marking two industry firsts, Christie’s was the first major auction house to offer a purely digital work with a unique NFT (Non-fungible token) - effectively a guarantee of its authenticity - and to accept cryptocurrency, in this case Ethereum, in addition to standard forms of payment for the singular lot.

Christie’s has never offered a new media artwork of this scale or importance before,’ says Noah Davis, specialist in Post-War & Contemporary Art at Christie’s in New York. ‘Acquiring Beeple’s work is a unique opportunity to own an entry in the blockchain itself created by one of the world’s leading digital artists.’

FROM SIMPLE DRAWINGS TO LIFE IN 3D

Consumers of internet culture will already be familiar with the South Carolina-based graphic designer and motion artist known as Beeple. His visionary and often irreverent digital pictures have propelled him to the top of the digital art world, winning him 1.8 million followers on Instagram and high-profile collaborations with global brands ranging from Louis Vuitton to Nike, as well as performing artists from Katy Perry to Childish Gambino.

In EVERYDAYS: THE FIRST 5000 DAYS, the artist has stitched together recurring themes and colour schemes into an aesthetic whole. The individual pieces are organised in loose chronological order: zooming in reveals pictures by turn abstract, fantastical, grotesque or absurd, deeply personal or representative of current events. Recurring themes include society’s obsession with and fear of technology; the desire for and resentment of wealth; and America’s recent political turbulence.

SO WHAT ARE NFTS?

NFT artworks are becoming a serious business. Last year, Beeple made US$3.5 million on an NFT auction. But the entry of a global blue-chip auction house like Christie’s into this domain may mark a new stage for blockchain technology, as a widespread tool for both maintenance and transformation of digital art markets.

NFTs support claims to an artwork’s value. While the JPEG file of Everydays may be copied, the collector’s blockchain-based record of ownership will allow them to display the work (and to resell it) on a number of online platforms.

Christie’s has teamed up with one such platform, Makersplace, for the deal. Makersplace uses an open standard smart contract for its NFTs, which means the work can be sold in many other places in the the increasingly complex NFT ecosystem. NFTs are useful in the digital art market because they enable claims to authenticity and scarcity, despite the ease with which digital works can ordinarily be copied. Artists and galleries have tried to create scarcity via limited-edition works and to assure authenticity with certificates, but NFTs seek to automate this process.

NFTs record ownership on a blockchain, which is a decentralised alternative to a central database. Built through cryptography and peer-to-peer networks, blockchains are resistant to tampering and hacking, which makes them useful for storing important records. Vince Tabora from US tech website Hacker Noon has written an accessible explainer of how blockchain is different from older ways of storing and organising data.

WHY BLOCKCHAIN?

Ever since blockchains were described in the white paper published by pseudonymous Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, the idea of a “trustless” way to keep secure public records has evolved into a so-called “confidence machine”, fuelling a considerable amount of hype.

And Christie’s is no stranger to new technology. The company has hosted regular Art+Tech Summits since 2018 (the inaugural topic being blockchain). In 2018, Christie’s proudly announced it was “the first auction house to offer a work of art created by an algorithm”, with the sale of the AI-generated painting Portrait of Edmond Belamy for more than 40 times its estimate. So by selling Everydays as “the first purely digital work” to be offered by a major auction house, Christie’s is reinforcing its self-described “position at the forefront of innovation in the art world”.

VIRTUAL TRADING CARDS AND CRYPTOKITTIES

At the same time, Christie’s auction was only the tip of the NFT-collecting iceberg. Industry publication Coindesk estimates the total value of the NFT market to be US$250 million. Platforms such as Opensea, Nifty Gateway and SuperRare host a rapidly expanding range of digital collectibles to buy and sell by a growing community of collectors.

Beyond art, digital collectibles include virtual trading cards, artefacts and attire for virtual gaming worlds. They also underpin games such as CryptoKitties, in which NFTs serve to secure the “unique genome” of each kitty in the game. These examples reflect the uptake of NFTs across different digital subcultures, providing collectors with claims to uniqueness that were previously considered impossible in the online realm.