London has overtaken New York and Shanghai in a global ranking of top technology cities, thanks to its “incredible entrepreneurial attitude”.
The capital is now the second most likely city in the world to create the next big tech giant, according to EY’s annual Attractiveness Survey, behind only of San Francisco in US.
The result moves London up from fourth position last year, closing in on its American west-coast rival.
Respondents believed a combination of the city’s existing financial services infrastructure (81%), access to talent (72%) and geographical position (68%) was giving London’s fintech scene an edge over the competition – with 39% expecting mobile payments to be the fastest growing sector, followed by peer-to-peer lending at 26%.
However it wasn’t just London that was reported to be a fintech hub, 37% of respondents believed Edinburgh was a major contender, with 26% arguing the case for Manchester and 7% for Leeds and Birmingham.
When looking at the locations for tech hubs, London is still No. 1 for enterprises, but other places surrounding or nearby London are making gains, too. In fact, of the 15 fastest-growing local authorities in the UK, more than half of them were London boroughs.
World’s Leading Tech Cities
This past summer, Compass released its 2015 edition of the Start-up Genome Project that offered a look at the ranking for the world’s 20 leading startup cities. London ranked No. 6., and Toronto was just behind Silicon Valley, New York City, Los Angeles, Boston and Tel Aviv.
UK is also home to some of the best and brightest B2B start-ups as well. A report released by IDG Connect earlier this year listed the top 20 pre-IPO firms in B2B tech, and a large chunk of them were founded in the UK.
An example of just one B2B enterprise is Anaplan, a British software tech start-up that’s located in York, hovering near England’s North Country. Anaplan has raised more than $150 million from a plethora of well-known brands, like HP, McAfee, Pandora and Expedia.
Observers may concede that much like New York and Silicon Valley, it can be rather expensive for a start-up to operate in London. However, akin to New York and Silicon Valley, if you want to garner the pulse of the industry then you have to go where everyone else is. And in the UK, that happens to be London.