London remains the world's financial centre. For the sixth year running

Posted on: 22 January 2026

The City of London Corporation's annual survey, published yesterday, confirms what many had pronounced dead: London remains the world's top financial centre, ahead of New York and Singapore. One hundred and two metrics, five categories, and a result that contradicts years of funeral orations about Brexit, capital flight, and irreversible decline.

The news arrives while newspapers keep telling another story: sixteen thousand five hundred millionaires fleeing the UK in 2025, the largest wealth haemorrhage in any country's history, destination Dubai and assorted tax havens. A biblical exodus, if certain reports are to be believed.

Except the two things don't contradict each other. In fact, read together, they tell a far more interesting story.

There's a fundamental distinction that mainstream narrative systematically confuses: where the rich choose to live doesn't coincide with where finance gets done. Two different phenomena responding to different logics. Dubai, the supposed promised land of fleeing millionaires, ranks eleventh in the Global Financial Centres Index. Outside the top ten. Monaco, the highest concentration of wealth per square metre on the planet, doesn't even appear in the top twenty financial centres. Switzerland, meanwhile, manages both: Zurich just entered the top twenty, Geneva remains in the upper tier. But Switzerland has real institutional infrastructure, built over centuries, not decades. Consolidated legal system, private banks with genealogies longer than most European monarchies, discretion coded into cultural DNA.

The question nobody seems to ask: who actually are these fleeing millionaires? Henley & Partners' figures, quoted everywhere, speak of sixteen thousand five hundred people. Sounds like a lot, until you discover it represents 0.6 per cent of Britain's millionaire population. Less than one per cent. And crucially: these are liquid millionaires with recent fortunes, not the establishment that keeps the City running.

A London School of Economics study interviewed Britain's super wealthy, asking whether they'd ever leave the country for tax reasons. The majority said no, and not out of patriotism: because they consider low-tax jurisdictions boring, inferior, lacking what London offers. Cultural infrastructure, schools where children build relationships that will last generations, clubs and institutions where real deals happen, a legal system with centuries of precedent. Those with capital rooted in consolidated institutional networks don't optimise for three per cent more net return. They optimise for access, influence, dynastic continuity.

Who's actually leaving? Tech founders with recent exits who confuse a liquidity event with being wealthy. First-generation non-doms with liquid fortunes and no roots, people who never got into the rooms that matter in London and therefore don't know what they're leaving. Footballers discovering Dubai doesn't tax income and thinking they've made the discovery of the century. Personal finance influencers documenting their relocation on YouTube, not realising they're announcing to the world that they lack the social capital to stay where decisions get made.

Because here's what nobody says: fleeing to Dubai for tax purposes is publicly declaring that your money is all you have. No network worth preserving. No relationships built over generations. No access to rooms you can't enter with a bank transfer. Just numbers in an account, to protect in a place with air conditioning and shopping malls. It's a confession, not a strategy.

And you see it in how they spend. New Money buys to be seen: golden Lamborghinis in the Dubai Mall car park, watches that look like wrist-mounted safety deposit boxes, villas designed for Instagram with infinity pools nobody uses. Every purchase a statement, every object a price tag displayed to the world. Old Money buys to last: the Savile Row bespoke suit with no logo in sight, the house in a neighbourhood that appears on no list, grandfather's watch worth ten Rolexes but looking like a Swatch to those who don't know how to look. The difference isn't in the money, it's in the security. Those who need to demonstrate how much they have are admitting they have nothing else.

Dubai is the natural habitat of those who confuse price with value. Everything glitters, everything is new, everything designed to impress those who can't distinguish. It's the paradise of those who got rich yesterday and fear not looking it tomorrow. London, a certain London, is the opposite: clubs with no sign outside, conversations that never end up on social media, an understatement that is itself a form of power. You don't need to prove anything to anyone when everyone who matters already knows who you are.

The truly wealthy, those with capital stratified over centuries of relationships, don't optimise for three per cent. They know the value of lunch at White's or a weekend in certain country houses isn't measured in basis points of return. They know their children will go to school with the children of those who'll make decisions in twenty years. They know real wealth is access, not liquidity. It's knowing how to behave, not how much you can spend.

Those going to Dubai have liquidity. Those staying in London have power. It's not the same thing, and those who don't understand the difference deserve exactly the life they've chosen: excellent for the portfolio, irrelevant for everything else.

And here the structural mechanism explaining everything emerges. The fleeing millionaire narrative serves someone. Who promotes it? Tax advisers, wealth managers, luxury estate agents, an entire ecosystem whose income depends on an environment favourable to mobile wealth. It's not information, it's lobbying disguised as reporting. The Tax Justice Network analysed media coverage of the supposed exodus: over ten thousand articles in 2024 about a phenomenon that, in real numbers, concerns less than one per cent of British millionaires. Thirty articles a day about something that, verified against data, wasn't happening at the scale reported.

London, meanwhile, stays where it's always been. Not because it's perfect: internet speeds are the slowest among the seven global financial centres in the survey, a serious problem for those wanting to compete in artificial intelligence. But London's competitive advantage has never been technological. It's institutional. It's common law with centuries of jurisprudence. It's being the time zone that lets you talk to Asia in the morning and America in the afternoon. It's speaking English. It's having all the connective tissue needed to run global finance, built over generations, not importable with a golden visa.

Those prophesying London's death after Brexit were confusing two things: where the rich live and where the work gets done. The rich can live wherever they want. But finance happens where there's infrastructure to do it. And that infrastructure doesn't relocate to Dubai because some tech entrepreneur discovered they don't pay taxes there.

If you know, you know.