Why Birmingham and the West Midlands?
Birmingham & the West Midlands - a growing ProfTech hub
Birmingham and the West Midlands: the place to create, innovate and build the future. A region where long-term, inclusive growth is driven by strong leadership, responsible investment, world-class businesses, and talented people.
Recognised as an “established FinTech hub” in the Kalifa Review, the region is home to the largest UK regional Business, Professional and Financial Services (BPFS) cluster, offering outstanding brands, scale, and unrivalled breadth of talent. It is a recognised high-growth ProfTech cluster made up of FinTech, LegalTech, PropTech, HRTech and InsurTech firms, that creates new, innovative businesses and attracts investors.
With a critical mass of expertise in investment and corporate banking; commercial and retail finance; insurance; global advisory; legal; and accounting, our region is firmly on the map as the most diverse and significant concentration of expertise outside the capital.
Key strengths of Birmingham & the West Midlands
A professional and financial powerhouse
The West Midlands’ deep-rooted and ever growing ProfTech sector encompasses a range of innovative firms, from well established and emerging players to new startups across the PropTech, FinTech, LawTech and InsurTech sectors.
Our region’s thriving FinTech community, worth £411m, is one of the largest in the UK outside the capital and is made up of both established financial services players seeking to embrace transformative technologies and data start-ups looking to drive disruptive change. It is also only 1 of 3 recognised FinTech hubs by the UK Government.
Home to the largest professional services cluster outside the capital
The West Midlands region has become a destination for leading institutions across the banking, legal and consultancy sub-sectors to serve clients across the UK and around the world. Home to the ‘Big Four’ accounting firms, as well as large global corporates including HSBC UK, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs and Gowling WLG, these arrivals have boosted our sector by 30% in the last five years – double that of Manchester- and is well complimented by our rising home-grown services including the likes of Wesleyan, Al-Rayan and NFU Mutual.
Disruptor companies including Birmingham based property finance firm CrowdProperty and FinTech PM Connect are just a few examples of companies that have successfully expanded on an international stage, through their use and adoption of technology, from here in the West Midlands.
Scale of incubators, accelerators, and initiatives
The extensive range of collaborative districts, incubators, accelerators, and initiatives, to support all firms, no matter their size, as part of a connected ecosystem makes the West Midlands an ideal location to base. Specifically for ProfTech companies, the key players are:
Serendip PropTech accelerator at Innovation Birmingham campus
Serendip FinTech accelerator also at Innovation Birmingham campus (launching March 2022)
SuperTech Seeds Pre_accelerator for proftech very early stage founders
The Engine Room from The Investment Association – Europe’s largest asset management fintech accelerator
These sit within a broad and rich ecosystem including: Birmingham Tech, STEAMhouse, West Midlands Regional Economic Development Institute (WM REDI), STEAMhouse, Million Labs, Coventry University Technology Park and the School of Code that can support the needs of ProfTech firms.
Many of these are established on the campuses of our world-class academic institutions, to provide companies with the opportunity to work with students and academics across a range of subject matters or developing research project opportunities directly on behalf of firms, in order to scale.
Breadth of talent
The success and growth of the ProfTech sector in the West Midlands is founded upon a deep and diverse talent pool.
Almost 40% of the city’s Banking, Finance and Insurance workforce identify as BAME
Our region is home to an established, youthful, and diverse employment pool that is readily available and ideally suited to serve international client demands. Over 340,000 people work in the sector locally across 53,000 companies and this is backed by a 16,600-strong graduate talent pool of business, finance, and law graduates from our region’s eight world-class academic institutions.
Birmingham & the West Midlands is also home to many Centres of Excellence:
The Engine Room
The University of Birmingham Business School
The Greater Birmingham Professional Services Academy (GBPSA)
Gillmore Centre for Financial Technology at Warwick Business School
School of Code
Quality of life
Located in the heart of the United Kingdom – and home to 4.7m people – the West Midlands is one of Europe’s most dynamic, forward-looking and ambitious metropolitan regions. It’s also home to one of Europe’s youngest (and most culturally diverse) populations, and a place with a proud tradition of openness and tolerance.
But despite being less than 1.5 hours away from London, being directly connected to 400 global destinations by air, and with 90% of the UK population accessible within a four-hour drive, the West Midlands is still a very affordable, flexible and spacious location.
This year the region is set to host the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games - the biggest sporting and cultural event to be staged in the UK for a decade and the largest event ever to be held in the West Midlands. This event will shine an international spotlight on everything great about the region, and importantly, will allow us to showcase our ProfTech sector and its capabilities to a global audience.