Company
The UK's main stock exchange, where companies list and trade shares; its Main Market hosts large-cap listings and IPOs, part of LSEG.
London recorded one IPO in the third quarter, a £29.8m AIM listing, and eight in nine months, EY says. Nine-month proceeds of £606.9m beat last year's £199.1m, but EY says most firms weighing a listing are looking to 2027.
Reality
Smarter Web began trading its MORE perpetual preferred shares in London on October 14 with an initial 12% annual dividend paid weekly. At the £90 issue price the running yield is 13.33%, a rate that rests on a treasury concentrated in Bitcoin.
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Peel Hunt counts 42 live bids worth £74bn for London-listed firms, more than double the £35bn bid across 2025. Bid numbers are close to 2025's and the targets are larger, so the stronger evidence that London is emptying sits on the listing side.
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Cmit, the LSE-led City taskforce, has asked Chancellor John Healey for pension tax breaks, including a dividend credit costing up to £742m a year. The measures aim to draw pension and ISA money into UK shares over years to 2042, so a board choosing between London and New York this year would still list into today's market.
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Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky told Bloomberg TV on Oct. 8 that the digital bank would put its primary listing in the US if it goes public. With a float not expected before 2028, the open question for London is whether it keeps a secondary listing beside New York.
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Wittington Investments, the Weston family's holding company, agreed on Wednesday to buy Boots from Sycamore Partners for $8.9bn. Boots gives up the prospect of public shareholders for a family owner promising stable long-term ownership and further investment.
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TBC Bank's Uzbekistan unit is considering its own IPO after a Franklin Templeton-run state fund raised $690 million on more than $2.8 billion of orders. Buyers now want to know whether reforms that one analyst says rest largely on presidential decree will hold, and Moody's has tied Uzbekistan's rating to the answer.
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Zilch has invited banks to pitch for a float as early as 2027, against a $2 billion private valuation of about 14 times revenue. The listing would test what public buyers will pay for a 2021 fintech price attached to a lender still reporting losses.
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Airtel Money is reportedly seeking an $8 billion to $9 billion valuation in a London IPO, with existing holders selling at least $800 million of shares. At that price, Airtel Africa's roughly 78% stake would equal about half of the parent's own market value.
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Monzo is in early talks to sell to Nubank at a reported £8bn to £10bn, against a £4.5bn valuation from an October 2024 employee share sale. A deal would likely end its plans to float, costing London one of the fintech listings officials hoped would revive a depleted market.
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Moneybox ran a 45 million pound secondary share sale aimed at long-serving staff as the average startup's wait to list reached 11 years, up from 6.9 in 2014. Outside buyers fund those payouts, so founders can reward tenure without spending company cash.
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Nik Storonsky called a London listing "just not rational" in 2024 over the 0.5% stamp duty that is still charged today, and he now tells Les Echos that Revolut, valued at $115bn, plans to list in London as well as on the Nasdaq.
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Smarter Web, the UK's largest listed bitcoin holder, wants £15m to £25m from London for a non-voting preferred share that pays a variable weekly dividend. The prospectus still needs FCA approval.
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The Bristol company wants £15m to £25m for MORE shares, a sterling perpetual preferred backed by 2,878 bitcoin, and the High Court cleared the dividend capacity in July, before any prospectus existed.
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London's register has fallen to 1,534 companies and more than 30 are leaving this year, while its seven first-half IPOs raised $780 million between them. LSE chief Julia Hoggett says the pipeline is the largest since 2005.
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The LSE's register has fallen from 2,429 companies in 2015 to 1,534 in May 2026. Reforms landing this summer cut the friction of going public, while the same account blames a domestic buyer base that has been rotating out for years.
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Nasdaq Ventures put $100 million into Payward for what works out to about half a percent, and the tokens are targeted for the second quarter of 2027. The surveillance and onboarding commitments bind sooner.
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Jutta Meier told Bloomberg that access to indium phosphide has become a risk for the whole chip industry, and her mitigation is broader supplier engagement in a market where the US Geological Survey puts 70% of supply in China.
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The platform holding 33.6% of direct-to-consumer assets is charging 0.35%, capped at £12.50 a month, to hold notes that HMRC has confined since 6 April to an ISA fewer than 150,000 savers appear to use.
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Payward held about $606m of a $2.5bn tokenized equity market in August, barely ahead of Binance's two-month-old product, and the LSE deal buys it inventory it could not get any other way while leaving UK investors out.
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