The UK must rapidly adjust to new digital assets technologies like crypto or risk losing our place as a global financial hub, writes Lord Kulveer Ranger

You may have heard quite a few voices recently raising what is perceived as the niche subject of digital assets. In fact, only last week even Google announced its own blockchain-based payments system Google Cloud Universal Ledger (GCUL). In this fast moving world it feels that London is standing at a crucial junction in the face of today’s unprecedented pace of financial technological change. At a time when 12 per cent of UK adults already own cryptoassets and one in four are considering buying cryptocurrencies for retirement planning, other jurisdictions are already pulling ahead of the UK in the race for digital finance dominance. So a critical question I have is, why blockchain, the technology that underpins digital assets, has not been included among the seven “frontier technologies” prioritised in the government’s recent modern industrial strategy?

The Oyster Card showed London could once lead innovation

Fifteen years ago, I was director of Digital London for City Hall and 25 years ago I was part of the implementation team for the Oyster Card digital payments system. In these roles I saw first-hand London’s capacity to be a world leader in digital technology. With Oyster, we were the first city in Europe to........

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