By Iain Withers
LONDON (Reuters) -Bosses from global financial firms pressed Britain’s finance minister Rachel Reeves on Wednesday to improve tax incentives for UK consumers to invest and to boost UK competitiveness, four sources briefed on the discussions told Reuters.
The British government has come under intensifying pressure to boost the country’s sluggish growth and to pursue reforms to revitalise its finance industry and better compete with rival centres to London like New York.
Executives from JPMorgan, BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citi, Fidelity, Schroders and abrdn all attended the meeting on Wednesday.
One focus of the talks was requests from the investment industry to change the tax treatment of cash savings accounts (ISAs) to encourage people to invest in stocks and bonds instead, two of the sources said.
Reeves was also pressed to cut stamp duty levied on stock investments, a long-standing demand from finance executives, two sources said.
The impact on Britain’s competitiveness of moves in the Budget to close loopholes that previously benefitted wealthy non-domiciled residents was also raised by industry representatives, two sources said.
Reeves reiterated her desire to cut red tape to help Britain compete, one source said.
The finance bosses at the meeting broadly welcomed the government’s ongoing attempts to make regulation more supportive of growth, the sources added.
The finance ministry declined to comment.
Reeves also laid out at the meeting that Britain would cut the time it takes to settle securities trades, according to a finance ministry statement earlier in the day, part of a wider push by global regulators to make it quicker and easier to trade.
The finance ministry confirmed that the UK could cut the time taken to one day from two, from Oct. 11, 2027.
“I am determined to go further and faster to drive growth and put more money into people’s pockets,” Reeves said.
(Reporting by Iain Withers, Additional reporting by Muvija M and Sachin Ravikumar, Editing by Paul Sandle and Tommy Reggiori Wilkes, Kirsten Donovan)
