Utilising the Irish/Scottish finance corridor

Blog written by Terry Quinn at the Scottish Irish Finance Initiative

The Scottish Irish Finance Initiative seeks to serve the people of both Scotland and Ireland, the companies that already work in our communities and the wider global financial services industry, whom we hope to attract to our corridor.

In our first 18 months of operations we have already created the beginnings of a common financial industry between Scotland and Ireland, emphasising the benefits of treating both places as the bridge to overcome trading barriers and as a target for new investments. The only sure-fire way that we can maintain our world beating financial industries and see off the challenge from locations such as Berlin, Paris and financial hubs in Asia, is through greater cooperation, and we are delighted that we are garnering such interest in our initiative.

Ireland and Scotland have enough in common culturally, legally and politically to make cooperation worthwhile, and enough complementary skills so as to make cooperation beneficial to both parties. We have already seen fruitful progress in the fintech sector through meetings organised between Irish and Scottish companies, considering a wide range of innovative solutions in areas such as data quality and cleansing. Our project is also driving engagement in ensuring that both locations benefit from cooperation in areas such as asset management and servicing and the creation of a more unified labour market.

Our aim with this document is to gather together into one place the resources that any company might need to mitigate any Brexit challenges, and to guide them in using the Scottish Irish corridor in their future growth plans. Already the challenge of Brexit has spurred some companies into accelerating sales programmes and to look proactively at the international options available to them.

Our hope now is that trade between Scotland and Ireland will not only continue but expand and that a proactive, pragmatic and sensible approach to Brexit difficulties can actually open up opportunities.

One of the key targets as set to us by our Advisory Group is to bring together in one document all the information that anyone interested in the Scottish Irish finance corridor would need.

The result can be found here:

http://scottishirishfinance.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/SIFI_brexit_utility.pdf

At present it’s focused on expediency in mitigating Brexit challenges but this is just the first iteration and we hope this will develop over time to become a fully fledged guide to all that our fabulous industries and companies have to offer the global finance sector and its clients and stakeholders.