British tech firms eye relocation after Brexit vote

Brexit has left the UK’s technology industry reassessing its position, with major firms putting expansion plans on hold as they consider a move to a continental location.

Britain’s financial technology sector is particularly hard-hit, with the prospect of losing access to European markets an unappealing one. “Fintech” has long been one of the UK’s most promising growth areas, in part due to London’s position as the financial capital of Europe.

Taavet Hinrikus, the chief executive and co-founder of foreign exchange service TransferWise, said that the industry will have to “wait and see” to find out the long-term effect.

“This is likely to affect regulation and the movement of talent, two massive issues for business. The two main benefits of being part of the EU are access to talent because of the free movement of labour and the fact that you can ‘passport’ regulation so if you’re regulated in the UK, you’re regulated across the EU. We don’t know what’s going to happen with either of those.”

Meet the women helping build the tech industry in the Middle East

If you left your country of birth in the midst of a war and found yourself in a promising career at Google, you’d be forgiven for staying put. But Lara Noujaim had other ideas. The business graduate travelled from Lebanon to California in 2006 and, after completing an MBA at Santa Clara University, she found work in America’s thriving tech sector, joining Google as a Data Evaluator in 2010. Three years later, however, she gave it up to pursue a very different ambition: she wanted to help create a games industry back home.

“I could have stayed and built a career in the States, but I’m a very patriotic person, we all are in Lebanon,” she says. “The games industry didn’t exist, I came home to be part of creating it. I wanted to give something back