David Wighton is a columnist for Financial News
Business confidence may be improving in the UK, but if you speak to company bosses in private, many are pretty despondent.
Judging by recent public comments, sentiment is especially dire in the fintech world, where some leading figures express near panic about the prospects of the industry in the UK. Though there are causes for concern, this gloom looks overdone.
The doomsters point to a recent outburst from the founders of Revolut, the UK’s most valuable fintech company, who launched a blistering attack on Britain as a place to do business. Chief executive Nik Storonsky slammed the UK regulators for long and unexplained delays in responding to its application for a banking licence.
“This is not the business environment to operate in the modern world,” he told The Times.
He also complained about taxation and the difficulty in attracting talent since Brexit. “In the past a lot of people would come to London. It was the place to be. That has now changed.”
In terms of the government’s efforts to promote the UK as a…