The City of London—the Square Mile of London's historic financial district—is Britain's financial centre and one of the world's two leading financial hubs alongside New York. It is governed by the City of London Corporation. The financial-services industry employs 1.1m people across Britain, accounting for 8% of the economy, or £224bn ($300bn) a year. Within the Square Mile itself, 225,000 people worked in finance in 2024, up by 36,000 since 2019. Another 181,000 worked in auxiliary fields such as law and accountancy, up by 51,000 over the same period.
Since 2007 Z/Yen, a City think-tank, has maintained widely watched indices of the competitiveness of global financial centres. London and New York once vied for the top spot; London fell to a distant second in 2020 but by 2026 rivalled New York once more, driven by improving sentiment. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley have kept their European headquarters in London; JPMorgan Chase is designing a new, bigger one.
As a trading venue for currencies, insurance and derivatives the City is unrivalled. Lloyd's of London is the heart of the specialty-insurance market. Half of global trade in interest-rate derivatives is executed in London, as is 38% of that in foreign-exchange derivatives. Britain's former position at the hub of a vast empire made London a natural home for the international currency market; it still benefits from the resulting network effects. Its time zone—ideal for buying assets from Asia in the morning, then offloading them to America in the afternoon—helps too.
The City is still home to more foreign bank assets, cross-border bank claims and international debt issuance than anywhere else. However, the share of global assets overseen by British investment managers has fallen from 13% to 10% over five years, and the London Stock Exchange now hosts barely any international listings: just 1.2% of the global total in the three years to 2025. Hong Kong is winning the race for international listings.
Brexit was not the cataclysm some feared. Xavier Rolet, then boss of the London Stock Exchange, warned in 2016-17 that 100,000 to 232,000 jobs might be at risk. The industry still employs 1.1m people—20% more, in real terms, than when the warning was issued. Amsterdam overtook London as Europe's share-trading venue; Stockholm became the hottest exchange for fresh equity capital; big investment banks built new trading floors in Paris. But none of this moved the centre of gravity from London.
The Square Mile has transformed from a strictly weekday destination into a seven-day-a-week one. It has 222 restaurants, 193 pubs and bars, 35 hotels and nine nightclubs. Weekend footfall rose by 8% in 2025 and Saturday-night footfall was up by 20% in early 2026, driven in part by a strategy devised by Chris Hayward, the Corporation's policy chair, to reimagine the City as a leisure destination. Hotel-room revenues in the Square Mile rose by 47% between 2019 and 2025, faster than other areas of London.
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