able to see a range of their advisers quickly and efficiently. Several respondents pointed to
the need to draw together complementary expertise to work out novel and bespoke services
for clients. It was judged to be less likely the case that a client would have a pure financing
or pure legal requirement. Another benefit of being able to draw in complementary
expertise quickly and build and maintain relationships with those who provide
complementary expertise is that firms will recommend each other to clients. It is therefore
important to be in the loop in London in order to tap into this source of demand:
I think it was the case that you had to be in the City because of the need to physically
interact. There were certain financial transactions which had to take place because of
the time criticality - discount market members and messengers used to carry pieces of
paper from one bank to another and they had to be in before 10 o’clock. With
electronic banking that doesn’t happen but there are other reasons why people still
need to be in the City ... Proximity and face-to-face contact are essential in the
investment banking business. There are those that argue against it because clearly the
very successful global investment banks - xx and others - they’ve all got huge places
down at Canary Wharf and they don’t feel that necessity [to be in the City]. But we
feel comfortable here - we’re close to the Bank of England, lawyers and accountants,
the regulators who advise us. It’s inconceivable to me . that we would do anything
other than stay in the City.
The above quotation illustrates an important point made by several respondents, that
the historical reasons for being in their current location are different from the reasons they
continue to stay in their current location. Two respondents put it this way:
There’s one thing I think we covered by implication is that it’s not only where your
clients are, it’s where your suppliers are. And that’s suppliers across a broad range
from the professional suppliers like lawyers and consultants and accountants through to
all the other suppliers.
First of all if you have a center which is relatively tight and you want to draw together
a meeting of three disciplines then it’s very easy and very quick. If people are
distributed around, it takes longer and we have to be fast in financial services to be able
to move quickly. It works in a number of ways. If you want to do something which is
a collection of different people for a trade association . you want to pull people into
that meeting. You don’t have to spend a lot of time out of the office to get to that
meeting . So you get much more cohesion from people turning up at these meetings
if the transport time is shorter - that’s one reason why you have people in close
proximity. You can draw people together very fast. Equally if you want to have a
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