Financial and Business Services

Manchester is home to some of the world’s leading financial, professional and business services companies from Barclays, BNY Mellon, AXA, Latham & Watkins, OakNorth and Adyen.

This diversity enables the city to provide expert support to a range of businesses, allowing them to quickly scale up operations at minimum cost and making Manchester a high quality, low risk investment location.

The city is also a leading destination for back office operations, offering businesses access to the UK’s most fully evolved and scalable talent pool as well as 30-40% average savings on operating costs.

Manchester’s financial, professional and business services sector can be traced back to the industrial revolution when the growing cotton industry received immense support from the city’s banks, insurers and professional services firms that set up here to take advantage of the opportunity.

Fast forward to today, the sector is the largest outside of London, accounting for 20% of the local economy, and Manchester is home to the UK’s largest regional FinTech ecosystem.

Manchester has historically been the location of choice for back office and technology operations but now also attracts more complex middle and front office financial services roles due to the highly-skilled workforce the city region has developed.

Spinningfields, one of Europe’s most successful urban regeneration projects, sits at the heart of the city’s FPBS industry, where it is estimated that 20,000 people work. Firms including Barclays, Deloitte and Brewin Dolphin are located here, a sign of their confidence in Manchester as a place where the largest transactions can be made and signed off.