How Is Silicon Valley Stealing The Hottest UK Fintech Talent? Venture Capital Specialist Explains

The UK is seen as a hotbed of technology talent which the giants of Silicon Valley are fighting to recruit. Areas where the UK is ranked highest include artificial intelligence and data science coming out of leading universities, and the financial technology community, engendered by the marriage of fintech startups and London's financial expertise. On the AI side, this hunt for talent was kicked off in 2014 by Google's acquisition of DeepMind, a relatively small team from Imperial College, for $400m. This was followed by Apple buying Cambridge-based natural language processing firm VocalIQ and more recently Twitter bought video AI startup Magic Pony. This is something of double edged sword, notes Hazel Moore, chairman and co-founder of FirstCapital, an investment bank based in London and Silicon Valley.