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With over 300 years of financial success

Edinburgh - a leading centre for asset management and fintech

Scotland's offer

Scotland is a leading financial and professional services centre - over £700m of assets are managed from Edinburgh.
Scotland attracts the highest amount of FDI outside of London.
Over 200 fintechs are based in Scotland
Scotland has 161,000 FPS jobs and FPS makes up £3.7bn of its exports

300+ years of financial services

Edinburgh, one of the UK’s leading hubs for finance, enjoys a strong reputation worldwide, as a longstanding and resilient financial centre, with deep expertise. Financial and professional services exports accounted for £4.9bn – and the talent pool of experienced financial services workers is exceptional – over 75% of jobs in financial services are high skilled.

Its established history of banking means that the city is home to the headquarters of major international banks. It is also a significant European centre of asset management and asset servicing, and is home to one of world’s largest asset managers – abrdn - with more than £500bn assets under management.

10,750 Financial and professional services jobs

Globally renowned Baillie Gifford is also based in the city, holding over £200bn in assets under management and managing money for more than half of the world’s 20 biggest pension funds. In addition, Edinburgh has established strengths in management consultancy and legal services.

Edinburgh, and Scotland more widely, is at the forefront of sustainable investment – bringing together pools of capital under management with innovative approaches to investment in ESG-compatible propositions and products. It is also a thriving fintech hub. In 2022, fintechs in Scotland received over £305m in funding supporting their growth and development representing an increase of over 200% on the previous year.

£139m Foreign direct investment in financial services between 2019 and 2023

An attractive prospect for investors, foreign direct investment in financial and professional services of £139m in Edinburgh between 2019-23 resulted in an additional 1,100 financial services jobs in the city.

Fintech

Asset management

Banking

At the end of January, the Lord Mayor and Policy Chairman visited Scotland to mark the City of London Corporation and Scottish Government’s annual Burns celebrations and signed an updated Partnership Agreement with the First Minister of Scotland, John Swinney.

The updated agreement will build on the collaboration commitment established in the 2024 agreement, to build a programme of work for 2025 that sets out concrete joint initiatives designed to deliver positive, tangible outcomes for Scotland’s FPS sector and the broader UK economy. Its scope has been streamlined to focus resources on delivering tangible outcomes in the following four priority areas: Investment, Green and Sustainable Finance, Fintech, Data, and AI, and Promotion and Communications.

Each priority area is supported by a work programme, outlining the overarching goals for the year ahead alongside mechanisms that detail the specific actions and initiatives to be implemented in order to achieve these ambitions in 2025.

Finance for a sustainable future

The Global City sustainable finance hub

Fintech success stories

Scotland’s capital city Edinburgh hosts one of the largest fintech clusters in Europe, made up of over 220 firms. Out of these 220, 37 are international fintech companies that have decided to make Edinburgh their home.

One of these is Eeden Bull, a Norwegian digital expense management platform currently valued at between £10-20 million. Created in 2018 by a team of payments experts, Eeden Bull has already been making waves in the payments market, delivering its services to a large number of customers in Europe, onboarding a new customer every 4 minutes! The firm has also launched its innovative payments and spend management programme through more than 65 Nordic banks for more than 9000 businesses.

Saving on bills and reducing carbon emissions

Edinburgh-based fintech company Snugg’s mission is to help accelerate the UK’s transition to net zero carbon emissions by helping people make their homes more energy efficient. Through the harnessing of tech and data, Snug assesses the energy efficiency of a house and based off its findings, creates a personalised, financial plan to help the homeowner make the changes needed to make their home more energy efficient, saving them bills in the long run and helping reduce carbon emissions.

The plan estimates upfront costs of any installations required as well as showing grants and financial options that the homeowner may be able to access and approved local installers who work nearby. Set up in 2022, ever since then Snugg has been on an upwards trajectory. In 2023 it won a place on the EY Fintech growth programme and in 2024, won nearly £2m in funds from the UK government to help them develop their services.

Enabling collective innovation through the financial sector

FinTech Scotland was founded in 2018 as a joint initiative by the University of Edinburgh, Lloyds Banking Group, HSBC and Scottish Enterprise. Its mission is to secure Scotland’s place as a top 5 global fintech centre by encouraging financial innovation, collaboration and inclusion.

Its purpose lies in its convening power. The organisation acts as a strategic enabler, bringing together the financial services sector, entrepreneurs, investors, consumer groups, universities and many more to develop and enable collective innovation through the financial sector.

One of FinTech Scotland’s initiatives has been the Financial Regulation Innovation Lab (FRIL). This is a research and innovation programme that encourages fintech firms to help shape and evolve the future regulatory landscape for the UK financial services sector. FRIL creates an environment for participants to engage and share perspectives

Partner story: abrdn

Partner story: Burness Paull LLP

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