Economic growth will depend on the success of our financial services sector

Financial services plays a unique role in channelling investment into other sectors through lending, capital markets activity and investment in UK assets. As such any successful industrial strategy will need to put financial services at its heart, to support one of the UK’s most dynamic and productive sectors, and its role in providing the vital financing needed to grow the rest of the economy.

Financial services and related professional services is one of the UK’s most economically important sectors contributing £243.7bn (12% of the total) to UK real Gross Value Added in 2023 and 2.4 million jobs in 2022. Analysis prepared by PwC for the City of London Corporation in 2024 shows that financial services contributed £110.2bn2 to the public purse in 2023. This is 12.3% of total UK tax receipts.

On 14 October 2024, the Government published its Industrial Strategy Green Paper, setting out their ambition to tackle barriers to growth in the UK’s highest potential growth-driving sectors and places. The Financial Services sector was identified as one of the eight sectors which offer the highest growth opportunity for the economy and business. As acknowledged in the Government's Green Paper, a renewed industrial strategy for the UK will need to be informed by an understanding of which interventions could have the biggest positive impact.

£18.4bn is what the financial services sector, including the bank levy and bank surcharge, contributed to corporation tax receipts in the year of March 2023, making it the largest contributor of any sector in the UK, according to HMRC data.

44% of financial services firms ranked cyber security as one of the top three most important components of the framework for growth.

The Financial Services sector provides highly productive, well paid jobs - in absolute terms, financial services output per job was £189,350 in 2023, while whole-economy output per job was £70,819.

Further collaboration between industry and education providers could help realise the significant benefits from increased levels of financial literacy (estimated to be nearly £7bn per year for the UK economy by the Confederation of British Industry).

Download The Framework for Growth and UK Financial Services

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