Good afternoon, and thank you for being here for the launch of our new report, Unlocking Growth Through a Stronger UK-EU Financial Services Partnership. 

I am particularly grateful to Freshfields for hosting us in this beautiful space and for the partnership that has shaped this report. We have an excellent programme this afternoon and a fantastic audience: representatives from across our membership, policymakers, members of the diplomatic community and professional services that make London a major financial powerhouse.

UK Finance represents the banking and payments sector that underpins the UK’s economic strength. They connect capital to opportunity across the world – doing so from the UK.

This mirrors, and indeed contributes to, London and the UK’s fundamentally outward-looking nature. That global instinct frames the report we’re here to talk about today.

Our members have deep financial relationships with jurisdictions around the world — from the United States and Switzerland to Singapore, the Gulf and the Indo‑Pacific. Each of those partnerships matters. None diminishes the importance of the others.

But the UK’s relationship with the EU is unique. It is structurally significant, economically deep, and politically complex. 

Of course, the timing of this report is not a coincidence: ten years ago, the UK voted to leave the EU. I’m not looking to cover the politics of the past ten years – we’re here today to look forward, to address some of the realities faced by our sector and propose solutions. 

The UK and EU remain part of a deeply interconnected financial ecosystem. The financial relationship between the UK and the EU did not follow the political one. Trade in financial services between us has actually grown since Brexit. The UK remains Europe’s principal global gateway for capital markets, derivatives and foreign exchange. And a significant share of EU‑domiciled assets continues to be managed from the UK. The two systems are more interconnected than the institutional relationship might suggest.

A political reset of the relationship is under way. This creates an opportunity to attempt to address the gap between the economic reality on the one hand and the institutional dynamics and ways we cooperate in financial services on the other. This is what this report is about.

This report is not a call for reintegration into the Single Market. The UK and the EU are autonomous jurisdictions, each pursuing their own regulatory agendas and global priorities.

Our argument is that two highly interconnected economies, with shared regulatory DNA and shared exposure to global shocks, can achieve more - and do so more efficiently - when they cooperate where it is practical and mutually beneficial.

The proposition at the heart of this report is thus not whether we should work together, but how.

And the context has changed. The geopolitical and economic landscape is more volatile. Growth is harder to generate. And the scale of investment required — to support the green and digital transitions, and increasingly Europe’s security needs — is substantial.

In the report, we set out the vision for a strategic partnership, with a three-stage roadmap sequenced to build confidence and political capital, looking at practical steps that are achievable now and building towards a long-term architecture that would support Europe’s collective financing needs.

We believe that the ideas in this report will reduce costs, and set out how a more constructive and ambitious chapter in UK–EU financial cooperation could be built.

You will hear a detailed presentation about the report later, but I want to be clear about one thing. The immediate opportunity is the Leaders’ Summit in the next few weeks. Financial Services needs to be on that agenda. The mechanisms to make progress in the short-term already exist. What is needed is a political mandate from the top.

Over time, the aim is to ease frictions for firms, deepen technical cooperation in areas like reporting and digital finance, and work towards a more ambitious UK–EU framework that supports more integrated European capital markets.

We directly asked and tested this approach with members. 

A stronger, more coherent UK–EU financial relationship benefits firms headquartered in the UK, firms headquartered in the EU, and firms operating more globally. It supports growth, resilience and competitiveness, and it strengthens our collective influence in global standard‑setting.

We’ve worked hard to make this report something that can be used in the months and years ahead – by our members, policymakers here and in the EU, and by the broader ecosystem across Europe. It is offered in a spirit of genuine partnership. And partnership requires both sides to move.

It does not ask whether the UK and EU should work together in financial services — that reality already exists. The question is how that cooperation can be made more strategic, more predictable, and more effective. The sessions this afternoon will cover some of the ways this can be brought to life and the role of our sector in doing so. 

Without further ado, I’ll hand the floor over to Emma Rachmaninov, Partner at Freshfields, who will provide her set of welcoming remarks and her perspective on this agenda.

Thanks.