London’s reputation as a financial capital rests on more than banks and trading floors: it also depends on being a place where companies choose to raise money from the public. Since 2024 the Financial Conduct Authority has rebuilt the rules for doing so, and this article explains what changed and what the evidence shows so far.
Where does London stand among global financial centres?
The most widely quoted league table is the Global Financial Centres Index, published by the consultancy Z/Yen. According to the Financial Conduct Authority, which republishes the UK positions as one of its competitiveness metrics, the thirty-ninth edition appeared on 26 March 2026 and again placed London second.
The FCA’s table shows London’s position alongside two other UK cities:
| City | March 2024 | March 2025 | March 2026 |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | 2nd | 2nd | 2nd |
| Edinburgh | 33rd | 29th | 28th |
| Glasgow | 42nd | 32nd | 43rd |
Edinburgh has climbed five places across the three editions, while Glasgow’s fall of 11 places in the latest edition (from 32nd to 43rd) is the largest move in the table. The FCA page reports rankings only, with no scores, and does not explain the movements. Readers should also remember that an index of this kind blends hard data with opinion, which brings us to how it is built.
How is a financial centre ranking put together?
According to the FCA’s description, the index combines 147 instrumental factors with respondents’ views on how competitive financial sectors are. The factors include third-party data from bodies such as the World Bank, the OECD and the United Nations; the opinion element comes from an online questionnaire.
That mix has two consequences. A ranking can move because perceptions shift, not only because anything measurable has changed. And a stable second place says London remains well regarded and well equipped, but it does not say whether companies are choosing to list there. For that, the picture is less comfortable.
Why did listing in London need fixing?
When the FCA opened its consultation on listing reform in May 2023, it cited the UK Listing Review’s finding that UK listings had fallen by about 40% since 2008. It also noted that between 2015 and 2020 the UK accounted for only 5% of initial public offerings worldwide.
The FCA’s chief executive, Nikhil Rathi, said at the time that the proposals would “significantly rebalance the burden of regulation”. He also acknowledged that a company’s decision on whether and where to list is “influenced by many factors”, so rule changes alone could not deliver a revival; government and industry would need to contribute too.
That caveat matters. The rules are one lever among several, alongside valuations, the depth of the investor base and where a company’s customers and ambitions lie. This publication has already looked at the other side of the story, in its piece on how London’s listed companies are responding to a shrinking stock market.
What exactly changed in the listing rules?
The FCA published its final rules in Policy Statement PS24/6 on 11 July 2024. The new UK Listing Rules sourcebook took effect on Monday 29 July 2024, replacing the old Listing Rules sourcebook.
The central change was structural. The old “premium” and “standard” segments were removed and replaced with a single category for equity shares in commercial companies. Based on the FCA’s own description of the reforms, the main design choices were:
- A simpler entry route. Eligibility requirements that can deter early-stage companies were removed, though prospectus disclosure rules still apply separately.
- Sponsor oversight at the gateway. The emphasis moved towards investor transparency and the role of sponsors, the advisers who vouch for a company at the point of listing.
- Fewer mandatory shareholder votes. The proposals removed required votes on transactions such as acquisitions, relying instead on disclosure.
- More permissive treatment of dual-class shares. This allows founders to retain voting control after listing, a feature long common in the United States.
A reasonable way to read these changes is as a shift in philosophy: from prescribing outcomes for companies to relying on disclosure and on investors to judge what they see. Supporters argue that this makes London competitive for growth companies. Critics of such shifts elsewhere have argued that fewer votes weaken minority shareholders. The balance between the two is a genuine policy debate, not a settled question.
What did the prospectus rewrite add?
Listing rules are only half of the capital-raising framework. The other half is the regime governing the documents companies must publish when they offer shares to the public.
According to the FCA’s Policy Statement PS25/9, first published on 15 July 2025, the new Public Offers and Admissions to Trading Regulations 2024 came into force on 19 January 2026. The aim, in the FCA’s words, is to make it easier for companies to raise capital in the UK and to reduce the costs of admitting securities to UK public markets.
Three features stand out:
- A new sourcebook, covering prospectus rules for admission to a regulated market, took the place of the earlier prospectus rules.
- A new public offer platform regime lets smaller and scaling companies offer securities outside a public market to a broad investor base, including retail investors.
- Firms could apply from 19 January 2026 to become authorised platform operators.
For a growing business, the practical point is that there are now more routes to raise money from many investors without a full market flotation. Whether that proves attractive will be visible in the number of companies that use it, and the early data are not yet strong enough to judge.
Does the rest of the regulator’s performance matter?
It can. The FCA has a secondary objective to support the international competitiveness and growth of the UK economy, and it publishes metrics each year to show how it is delivering. The latest set, published on 9 July 2026, is the third year of publication and is grouped into four themes: authorisations and operational efficiency, policy and regulatory impact, data collection, and digital and innovation.
Some of the figures bear on London’s day-to-day appeal as a place to do regulated business. The FCA reports that 99.3% of authorisation cases were assessed within statutory service standards, although the page does not state the period covered. It also says firm withdrawals from applications fell from 809 in 2023/24 to 389 in 2025/26, which it attributes to applicants being better prepared.
These are regulator-reported measures of process, not independent assessments of outcomes, and they say little on their own about whether London is winning business from rivals.
How big is the City’s home economy?
A regulator’s rulebook sits within a much larger economic base. The Office for National Statistics estimated London’s gross domestic product at £617,915 million in 2023 at current market prices, on a provisional basis, out of a UK total of £2,720,029 million. Illustrative arithmetic shows London’s share:
£617,915m ÷ £2,720,029m ≈ 22.7%
The ONS also reported the highest output per head of any region, at £69,077. Our earlier article on how big London’s economy is goes into the regional comparisons. The point here is simply that listing reform is about the quality of London’s capital markets within an economy that is already large, not a rescue of a failing one.
What the rewrites can and cannot change
Rules can lower the cost of entry and make a market feel less bureaucratic. They cannot, by themselves, create the deep pool of investors and the valuation confidence that persuade a company to list in the first place. Much of that depends on factors outside the FCA’s hands, including pension fund behaviour, the tax treatment of share ownership and global investor appetite.
London’s other strengths are also real. As this publication has argued in its coverage of how London’s financial district is changing and why international wealth still chooses London, the capital’s advantages lie in its legal system, its professional services ecosystem and its time zone, not just in a single rulebook.
Judging the reforms by what happens next
The reforms are now in place at both ends of the process: the listing gateway since July 2024 and the prospectus regime since January 2026. The honest test is whether more companies choose London in the coming years, and the evidence available so far, a stable second place in a perception-influenced index, does not answer that yet. Readers who want to follow the story should watch new listing numbers, use of the public offer platforms, and any further FCA amendments, rather than headlines about any single flotation.
This article is general information, not personalised financial advice; rules and rates change.
Sources: Financial Conduct Authority; Office for National Statistics
