Special report: Leeds 'on verge of new industrial revolution' in financial technology

Chief amongst these is growth, not just in London and the South East but across the country, and Mr Charters sees building on Leeds as a financial and tech hub as key to this.

Before becoming an MP, the 29-year-old had a successful career working for the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority in London.

But the York native doesn’t want youngsters, like his son, to be forced to leave Yorkshire to pursue a successful career in financial services.

“I’ve got a little two-year-old boy and thinking 16 years ahead, could he have the opportunity of creating a career in the North that was unimaginable for me?” he tells me.

And with both the Bank and the FCA expanding their teams in Leeds, new career routes are opening up and more businesses are being attracted to the city.

While across the whole of Yorkshire, financial services employs 145,000 people and generates £11.8billion for the region.

The Yorkshire Post accompanied Mr Charters on his visit to Leeds to meet the FCA, property transaction innovators Pexa and also Yorkshire Building Society, to see how the city can continue to grow.

At consultancy EY, with its new state-of-the-art offices in buzzy Wellington Place, the MP hears from former apprentices Liam Carter, 25, and Mikey McWilliams, 21, about how they are forging their careers in their home city of Leeds.

EY now employs 500 people in the city, and welcomed 64 new graduates, apprentices and interns from the region in the last year.

Mr Carter, now an assistant manager on the intelligence and automation team, explains: “The apprenticeship was a good decision - I never really wanted to go to university to be honest.

“If I didn’t get in touch with the EY Foundation, I don’t think I would have ever gone for an apprenticeship in this sector.

“I don’t think I would have got into this sector in the first place if I hadn't had that connection.”

While Mr McWilliams, now a senior associate in insurance, started out by doing work experience, which he says “gave me the exposure to the apprenticeship scheme, so it was a no brainer instead of going to university”.

This is what a thriving Leeds means, talented youngsters staying in the city instead of going to London, Manchester or Edinburgh to pursue their careers.

Listening, Mr Charters responds: “The way this resonates most to me is as a dad.

“When I left York and went to university, I wanted to go into financial and professional services.

“Where did you go? London - it has that gravitational pull.

“For my son, I’d rather like him to have the chance to stay up North, the best place in the world, with the best people in the world.

“To create that alternative career path where you don’t have to go through London.”

EY partner in Leeds Georgina Knockton adds: “We’ve been driving regional growth for a very long time

“You look at Manchester, it’s always been a very dominant hub.

“I would love to see Leeds as an equal, or if not greater, in that Northern network.

“It’s such a great city as you’ve said, the countryside, the vibrancy, the resilience of the people - it’s such a fantastic opportunity for us to grow.”

A few hundred metres away from the EY office, in Queen Street is the FCA’s Leeds office - which has grown from one person in 2022 to 300 people now.

Mr Charters describes the regulator and the Bank of England as “anchor tenants” and explains: “They have had this talismanic effect to create a signal to the rest of the private sector that Leeds can be this epicentre for financial services.”

The office is covered with symbols of Yorkshire, from the Golden Owl of Leeds to the landscapes of the Dales, and FCA Director William Hague says: “We are a national regulator with a Yorkshire heart and we want to be part of the Yorkshire community, we want to be a positive influence here.”

Like the Mr Charters, Mr Hague made his career in London before returning to his home region to run the new FCA office.

He says the range of skills and talent across West Yorkshire and the wider region has really allowed the FCA to expand faster than expected.

“There’s a broad skills base in the region, which means knowledge intensive sectors, like ours, are able to get that expertise and talent that they need, and I see nothing to see us hitting a ceiling on that at all,” Mr Hague adds.

Leeds is becoming a centre for fintech, and one of the innovative businesses which has made the city its base in recent years is Pexa.

The Australian company has revolutionised buying properties Down Under, with 90 per cent of house purchases going through Pexa’s platform.

This means the conveyancing and money exchange is all done digitally and on-time and it’s cut the time it takes to buy a house in Australia to five weeks.

All the while, the UK sits at over 24 weeks. Mr Charters explains he experienced the idiosyncrasies of this first hand recently, when after being hit with a no-fault eviction his family had to wait eight months for their house purchase to go through.

Even after completing, the MP and his young family had to wait for hours while the previous owners packed up their stuff.

Pexa has the potential to end all that and bring UK property purchasing into the 21st century.

The firm, which now employs 400 people in the UK, the majority in West Yorkshire, could have picked any major city to base itself, but chief operating office Simon Wright tells Mr Charters that having the Bank of England and the FCA in the city was key.

“As we were making my decision about where to come and where to base ourselves, the announcements about the Bank of England committing to move to Leeds and make it its northern hub was a key factor,” he explains.

“Access to skills, access to expertise, if you look at the universities in this region and therefore access to things like data” were all important, Mr Wright says.

“I’ve got a real affiliation with the city,” he adds.

“I’ve seen this city develop. There’s a real belief in the city now that we can do something special. There’s a real desire for people to come together and drive that change.”

Mr Charters concurs: “We’re on the verge of another industrial revolution, through tech and fintech, and Leeds is perfectly placed to lead that.”