Altus

With intangible products that can flow seamlessly over borders (at least in theory), you can see why the EU decided the Financial Services sector would be an ideal guinea-pig for the single market project. In March 2000 the EU Council kicked off the Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP) - an ambitious programme of 42 reforms designed to level the playing field across Europe.

The UK is in an excellent position to profit; the Financial Services sector here is generally regarded as more developed and many of the measures in FSAP had their roots in UK regulation. The sector has consolidated faster in UK too with painful integration lessons learned in the process. And it has created a sizable industry around private pensions much faster than many European counterparts – as mainland Europe wakes up to its demographic timebomb this is a market which will surely balloon across the Channel in the next 20 years.

So it is not surprising that a number of the big UK financial groups have been expanding their operations in Europe. As several of them have learned though, there is more to operating in Europe than just a change of currency.
Altus have been working in Europe for several years and have gained hands-on experience of the operational challenges. Understanding complex legal entity structures across borders, the VAT implications of shared services, branch versus FoS status, local data protection rules – these are just some of the issues we have talked for our clients.

For some details of our work in Europe, see the case studies section to the right.