There is a reproduction of a map of Edinburgh in Ray Perman’s The Rise and Fall of the City of Money: A Financial History of Edinburgh that highlights the array of financial firms that dotted the city at the turn of the 20th century. The range of banks, asset managers and investment trusts that the city boasted at that time, some names familiar and some less so, provide us with certain insights into the past, present and future state of the Scottish financial sector.
Many of these institutions have since merged with competitors or simply crumbled into the winds of history, with their physical remains turned into hotels, shops, or eateries. The Edinburgh-founded North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, for example, occupied an incredibly grand palazzo on Princes Street, but after becoming a subsidiary of Commercial Union the building was bought by BHS and turned into a Brutalist horror. Rather than banknotes, pints and pub fare are now dispensed out of the former Union Bank of Scotland building on George Street (the company merged with Bank of Scotland) in its current incarnation as a Wetherspoons. Such examples are legion.
Concentration has been the name of the game in Scotland, both geographically (the relative importance of other financial hubs such as Glasgow and Dundee has declined) and with the manoeuvres of the nation’s major companies. Perman pointed Investors’ Chronicle to the example of the Scottish life assurance firms – there were nine of these when he reported on Scottish finance in the 1970s/1980s, but over the years the key players have been demutualised and sold off to bigger groups.