Julia Hoggett on London Listings, Pension Reform and the UK’s Capital Markets

Dame Julia Hoggett, CEO of London Stock Exchange plc, argues that Britain has disconnected its people and savings from its capital markets. In this March 2025 conversation, Harry Stebbings asks her why businesses and investors might choose London over the United States. Hoggett runs an exchange that competes for listings, a commercial interest relevant to her case.

Hoggett says she came to the job almost by accident. Trained as a sociologist studying sub-Saharan East Africa, she entered finance wanting to understand Malawi's place in the global economy. By 2020 she was the FCA's director of market oversight.

That summer, when Apple was worth more than the FTSE 100, she wrote down the things she thought she could influence to change the situation. A headhunter called the next day about the exchange role. In retrospect, she jokes, her list was too short.

Her core thesis remains that Britain has strong universities, entrepreneurs, startups and capital markets but has not connected those ingredients effectively enough. The City has served a global financial system well, she argues, while doing less for the domestic economy; she sees no reason it cannot do both.

Hoggett suggests that serving the EU single market helped disconnect finance from the domestic economy. She also believes regulation made advice and regulated markets harder for retail investors to access, even as the user journey for crypto became straightforward. She wants people to feel they have a stake in the businesses that create jobs and public revenues.

She traces part of the shift to changes in defined-benefit pensions: bringing liabilities onto corporate balance sheets and accounting for changes through earnings created volatility that executives wanted to reduce. In her account, schemes closed or de-risked, reducing exposure to equities and other risk assets.

Hoggett thinks that trend contributed to slower growth after the global financial crisis, although the interview does not establish the size of any causal effect. Her optimism rests on the view that choices made over decades can be changed, and that the UK retains substantial institutional capital and research capacity.

Asked whether Britain needs deregulation, Hoggett prefers outcomes-based regulation. Rules may begin with a sound objective, she says, but compliance can become an end in itself without anyone checking whether the desired outcome has actually been achieved.

For retail investors, she would measure success in financial literacy, access, savings and participation in the economy. She argues that policymakers should also monitor how changes affect domestic risk capital, instead of discovering the cumulative consequences many years later.

She wants a financing path that matches how companies grow today. Large private companies may need public-market capital when their next funding round is too large for existing venture and private-equity investors; pension funds investing earlier must also work within their own constraints.

Stebbings asks why UK pensions cannot invest directly like Canadian plans. Hoggett describes a package of related reforms: listing and capital-raising rules, research coverage, pensions and retail access, and the wider culture surrounding capital markets. She says the changes must work together.

Hoggett says recent listing-rule changes made London more flexible and argues that research rules had reduced coverage of European companies. Her assessment of the reforms' effectiveness is her own; the conversation does not compare individual issuers' compliance costs.

She contrasts de-risked defined-benefit schemes with fragmented defined-contribution plans. In her view, many DC funds lack the scale and expertise needed to build portfolios of private companies, while a focus on cost rather than net returns can discourage expensive but potentially valuable investment work.

Pension consolidation, she hopes, will allow UK institutions to invest more like Canadian and Australian peers. She also points to the proposed PISCES crossover market and the need to connect institutional money with venture and private-equity expertise.

Hoggett says 11 major default DC schemes had committed to aim for 5% of assets in private companies by 2030. She describes the target as covering companies in the UK and elsewhere; her hope that investment would be predominantly domestic was not presented as a commitment.

To her, the missing link is not necessarily a shortage of good companies or stock pickers, but the connection between large institutional pools and the investors who can source and evaluate growth businesses. She says reform should assess value for money through net returns, not fees alone.

Stebbings challenges her with founders who prefer a US listing. Hoggett counters with a statistic she attributes to her own analysis at the time: of 20 UK companies that raised over $100 million in US listings in the preceding decade, nine had delisted, four were up and the others were down more than 80%. The sample, comparison period and methodology are not independently established in the interview.

Her interpretation is that smaller issuers can be overlooked in the US, especially without index inclusion, while attention clusters around the largest companies. She also says perceptions of London are affected by media narratives and by incentives within the investment-banking industry.

On liquidity, she claims FTSE 100 free-float-adjusted turnover is higher than that of the S&P 500 or Nasdaq. She distinguishes the proportion of available shares traded from absolute trading volume, which can be larger in the US because its largest companies are much bigger. These are aggregate claims, not a guarantee for an individual company.

Hoggett calls UK stamp duty on share purchases a distortion: in her examples, buyers pay it for UK shares but not for US or European shares. She estimates annual Treasury receipts at £3–4 billion and acknowledges that replacing or phasing out the revenue would matter to the government.

She argues that many of the same international investors can buy a London listing, and that index eligibility can be an important difference. Her discussion of potential FTSE entry and US index restrictions is an argument about listing choices, not a guarantee that any particular company qualifies or is included.

Hoggett says some companies have also moved from the US to London and cites growth-market examples. On valuations, she refers to comparative analysis that, she says, adjusts for growth and business performance; in her view, the underlying company matters more than a universal UK discount.

Stebbings raises Deliveroo as a possible counterexample. Hoggett points to other factors affecting its valuation and says Arm once traded at a higher multiple than its peers when listed in London. She argues that an issuer can access international investors in London and use an American depositary receipt to reach additional US investors.

Discussing Arm's later US listing, Hoggett argues that it could have benefited from the AI trade in London too, while acknowledging this counterfactual cannot be proved. She says limited UK ownership after the listing meant British savers missed some exposure to the upside of a company built in their ecosystem.

She describes a risk-capital flywheel: funding supports research, jobs and growth; successful businesses generate returns, dividends and tax revenues; those returns can then support savers and further investment. The flywheel is her proposed model, not a promise that every investment succeeds.

Stebbings worries that London has become less attractive to developers, citing perceived regulation, living costs and crime. Hoggett points to the FCA's fintech sandbox as an example of a deliberate choice to support new businesses, and says the next challenge is building a financing continuum that lets companies start, scale and stay.

Asked how to change pension-fund risk appetite, Hoggett focuses on net returns and scale. She says Canadian and Australian plans may pay higher fees yet achieve better net real returns; a small annual difference, compounded over a working life, can materially change an individual's outcome.

Private investing requires a portfolio because some companies fail, she says. Consolidated funds can support the staff and diversification required to originate and evaluate such investments. She also favors incentives for domestic investment, while recognizing that investors need good assets in which to invest.

The discussion turns to executive pay. Hoggett argues that market practice has sometimes constrained the pay of leaders of listed companies even when competing for global talent requires higher compensation. She calls for a balance between competitive incentives, long-term value creation and alignment with shareholders.

Asked about Wise, Hoggett says a company of its size risks being overlooked in the US and has developed a following in Britain. She rejects the description of London as a small pond and argues that the choice depends in part on where a company operates and what it needs from an index and investor base.

On Brexit and European markets, she acknowledges that leaving the single market naturally shifted some activity to Europe. She also thinks it forced a useful discussion about the City's role in both global finance and the UK economy, rather than offering a simple verdict that the effects were wholly positive or negative.

Hoggett cites figures for equity capital raised in 2024–25 to argue that London remained a substantial market. Capital raised over a selected period is a different measure from market capitalization, trading volume or the number of IPOs; her comparisons reflect the figures and timeframe she chose in the interview.

For stamp duty, she proposes a gradual taper rather than an immediate abolition. Her suggested sequence is to encourage pension and retail investment, potentially increase equity flows and receipts, then start reducing the tax, perhaps for smaller retail trades. The expected fiscal effect is a proposal and forecast, not an established result.

With a magic wand, Hoggett would restore incentives to invest domestic capital in the UK and change how the country talks about its entrepreneurs. She believes backing successful founders can support a virtuous circle of investment, jobs and public revenue.

She also wants a culture that celebrates the risks founders take and the new products they imagine. In her view, habitual pessimism can obscure the country's strengths; optimism, however, is a cultural preference rather than evidence that every venture will succeed.

Asked what she would tell Revolut's founder, she says London's offer is at least as compelling as the US and suggests that a company of Revolut's scale could enter the FTSE 100. Index inclusion depends on applicable rules and eligibility, and the choice to list rests with the company; her statement is an advocacy position, not a confirmed outcome.

Hoggett calls the exchange a 300-year-old fintech: its enduring purpose is to connect people with capital to those who need it, but the technology used to do so has changed. She says the exchange needs to explain that role and celebrate its listed companies more visibly.

In the quick-fire round, she says her principle is to change a system if it is not working. She has also learned that four hours of sleep is unsustainable and wishes she had more time with her family.

Her approach to decisions is to assemble people willing to challenge her assumptions. The goal is not for her to be right, she says, but for the group to reach the best answer with the information available and update it when new information arrives.

Her single piece of advice to the chancellor would be to advance pension reform and unlock capital. Asked about ESG, she says considering companies' climate impact is legitimate, but overly prescriptive requirements can produce perverse incentives, for example when larger firms can supply data more easily than smaller green businesses.

Hoggett argues that financing the transition requires room to learn, fail and innovate. She also worries that public debate leaves too little room for trade-offs: social and economic choices often have shades of grey that do not fit an algorithm-driven, binary argument.

She says teams often present two opposing options when a workable middle course exists. Looking to 2035, her aspiration is for London to be a leading international exchange and the default choice for significant UK companies supported by domestic capital throughout their growth. It is a vision, not a forecast of an achieved result.