banks are a source of work and a source of clients and that’s always been valuable for
practices like ours. Being here is all tied up with London as a prime international
center - there’s absolutely no doubt about that. There’s no other place in the world
where it would be logical for us to have the most number of people. And that is
entirely tied down to London’s international standing because our focus has always
been City related work and the City related work now is of such huge importance
internationally. So we’re very dependent on London retaining its status and therefore
London remaining attractive to the key banks.
Where international customers are concerned, “closeness” relates to the fact that being
in the center of London puts a firm on their beaten track, so while not close comparing HQ
to HQ, they are close in the sense that they are regarded as easy to access. Another
advantage which works to the benefit of the cluster is that having a range of firms in the
same line of activity in close proximity means that there is a strong competitive spur
driving firms to innovate, drive up service quality and to keep down costs.
As financial services become more standardized and novel products or services are
easy for rivals to copy, so firms are competing on service differentiation. There is a need to
be close to the client in order to work out bespoke solutions and to provide a high level of
personal service. One firm put great importance on being able to get their clients to visit
their premises so that they could get a rich experience of the nature of the firm with whom
they were dealing. In some businesses it is important to be near clients in order to cut down
on the time and money costs of visiting clients. This factor was above all stressed by
accounting firms, where staff spend a particularly large proportion of their time with
clients.
One advantage of being close to other firms in the same line of business is the ability to
work out solutions and share risk:
There is an awful lot of business that is done which is joint business between
institutions. There is more and more now of large transactions which are done jointly
and the risk is spread then between different organizations. So there’s a need not only
for you to get yourself together with a client but to get those proposing the solution
together.
Being close to other types of firm which provide complementary services is important
because it enables multi-disciplinary teams to assemble quickly to meet client needs. It is
also convenient for clients, particularly those who travel some distance to London, to be
27