In the Wake of Brexit, Amsterdam Is the New London

How a city less than a tenth of London’s size is becoming Europe’s unlikely financial powerhouse.

Friday, June 24, 2016, was the kind of sparkling summer’s day that usually inspires giddy buoyancy in London. On that morning, however, anxiety and distress fell on the city like a lead weight, as the results of the previous day’s Brexit referendum rolled in. More than 17 million Brits, nearly 52% of those who cast a ballot, had voted to leave the European Union, after 43 years in the world’s biggest single market.
For Rhian Ravenscroft, an attorney for U.S.-based bond-trading platform MarketAxess, there was plenty of time to consider her next move. Seven months pregnant and deeply upset, she had an hour-long journey from her suburban home to the company’s European headquarters in London’s Barbican district. By the time she reached the office, she knew what she would do. “I was the first one to ask to move,” says Ravenscroft, who is British.

In the Wake of Brexit, Amsterdam Is the New London AMS12.19.Opener

In the Wake of Brexit, Amsterdam Is the New London AMS12.19.Opener

When I meet Ravenscroft in October, more than three years later, it is on another sparkling, sunny morning. But now she is sitting in a centuries-old canal-side house in Amsterdam—MarketAxess’s new EU headquarters. The sound outside the picture windows is not London traffic but rather the lapping of water from riverboats gliding by. In London, Ravenscroft, now the company’s senior legal counsel, had a $32 roundtrip train commute. Today, she has dropped off her 3-year-old daughter, Seren, by bicycle at a kindergarten nearby, then locked her bike with its infant buggy outside the office. Total commuting time: five minutes. Total cost: zero. “The quality of life has totally changed,” says Ravenscroft, 36, still stunned by the shift. “Not having to commute up to three hours a day frees up a lot of time to concentrate on your job.”
Ravenscroft is hardly alone in having her life radically upturned by Brexit. The question of whether or when the U.K. will leave the EU has dragged Britain’s economy and political apparatus into dysfunction. A U.K. general election on Dec. 12 and a Jan. 31 deadline for an exit deal are the next plot twists in this long-running drama that could cement the country’s departure—or not. But much of the corporate world has decided it can’t wait any longer to see the final episode. Since the votes were counted in 2016, hundreds of businesses have pulled their operations entirely out of Britain, or relocated key segments to the other 27 EU countries, uprooting thousands of employees to avoid running afoul of European regulations.

https://fortune.com/longform/brexit-amsterdam-the-new-london-europe-companies/

In the Wake of Brexit, Amsterdam Is the New London

How a city less than a tenth of London’s size is becoming Europe’s unlikely financial powerhouse.

In the Wake of Brexit, Amsterdam Is the New London

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