LONDON: The City of London Corporation, the financial hub of the UK capital, is pitching itself as an ideal centre for Indian multinationals to base their corporate treasury departments as Britain prepares to leave the EU.
Catherine McGuinness, the Policy Chair of the Corporation, will embark on a four-day visit to India next week with a post-Brexit message of reassurance of London's inherent strengths.
"The message I will be carrying with me is that we are still a great global financial centre because some of the noise around Brexit rather disguises that," said McGuinness ahead of her visit.
"One area we would like to explore with India is what more we could do to attract corporate treasury departments to base themselves here because this is the foreign exchange capital of the world, as well as other services," she said as Britain prepares to leave the European Union (EU) at the end of the month.
The City of London Corporation released a new report this week to highlight London's strengths as a centre for financial risk management and corporate treasury, a function which has evolved from that of a data provider which aids financial reporting into critical support for corporate strategic planning and risk management.
The Corporation aims to boost London's lead in the sector and encourage overseas multinational companies to choose the UK as a place to locate their corporate treasury operations, leveraging the city's deep capital market, wide range of financial instruments and global reach.
"The UK's unique capabilities as an international financial centre mean it is perfectly positioned to help multinationals mitigate a diverse range of financial risks.
"With an extensive network of 250 international banks and channelling 43 per cent of global forex trading, we can support multinationals in managing currency and liquidity risks on a global scale," explains McGuinness.
Her India visit, which covers Mumbai and New Delhi between January 26 and 29, is themed around innovation.
Among the other key focus areas would be green finance as well as a 'Women in Finance' event to explore shared best practices to encourage greater diversity within the financial sector.
Besides, the Corporation is keen to add its weight behind a renewed focus on the UK-India Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD).
"We welcome the EFD being held. There has been a hiatus for all sorts of understandable reasons but given the great potential for closer relationship, a UK-India EFD would be very timely and we would be keen to contribute, particularly around the area of green finance and tech," said McGuinness.
She highlighted the reforms initiated by the Indian government to the country's insolvency regime and other areas as a sign that India is in a place where it is ready to take off over the next few years, offering a "fantastic" trading opportunity both ways.
Bilateral India-UK trade was pegged at 20 billion pounds in 2018, out of which 440 million pounds accrued to financial services, which the City of London believes offers a lot of capacity to build on.
"We have 15 financial firms from India in the Square Mile and we are the number 1 listing venue for Masala Bonds. We'll be concentrating particularly on what we can do together on innovation and tech, what we can learn from each other on the flip side of that which is the cyber threat. We will be concentrating also on green finance and also talking to British businesses on how to increase trade and asking what they would like to see out of the EFD," said McGuinness.