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The boss of a UK-born fintech unicorn has called for the London Stock Exchange (LSE) to merge with New York’s Nasdaq in a bid to save the City market’s future prospects.
“It’s completely broken,” Barney Hussey-Yeo, founder of AI fintech Cleo, told City AM when asked about the recent string of delistings.
Hussey-Yeo, a data scientist who founded his $1bn business in 2016, has said the upcoming autumn Budget marks a deadline to turn around the market’s prospects.
“It’s doable and there’s lots of things to do but it’s the political will and actually getting stuff done which is the issue,” he added.
One bold idea the straight-talking fintech boss pointed to was a merger between the LSE and New York’s tech-heavy Nasdaq stock market.
“The UK is only ever going to have finite capital, it’s the sixth biggest economy in the world, but it’s finite,” he said.
To solve this, Hussey-Yeo proposed a “pan UK-American stock exchange” which he said would “dramatically change the depth of capital and listing prospects” of UK and US companies.
He said the new task force created by Rachel Reeves and US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent offered an “opportunity to do two major things” to impact economic growth.
The first, he said, would be a capital markets merger whilst the second could allow firms to “instanty passport” across the nations with bold regulatory reform.
“Trusted nations trust each other and want to be partners so then the regulators should trust each other as well – and that would be so much easier for firms operating across juridstictions.”
Hussey-Yeo led Cleo’s desertion to the US in 2020 after frustration with the UK’s risk-averse landscape.
Reeves attempts to power LSE up with fintech
The damning diagnosis of the London market’s tech prospects follows an attempt by Rachel Reeves’ to galvanise fintech listings in her Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy.
This year, the market was dealt a blow after money transfer firm Wise ditched its primary listing in the favour of the US.
Hussey-Yeo said the pattern of the fintech’s scaling up in the UK before taking their business across the Atlantic would be “very natural”.
“We’re absolutely already an incubator economy – that is what we are and we have been.”
Cleo is one of a fleet of UK fintech firms viewed to be in the next cohort of potential listing candidates.
The firm’s revenue shot up 106 per cent in the last year to $136m as subscribers grew 42 per cent.
Looking to the future, Hussey-Yeo said he was watching the moves of his fintech peers following Klarna’s New York debut this month and speculation surrounding a float from Monzo and Revolut.