Invest Northern Ireland (Past Sponsor)

Invest Northern Ireland (Invest NI) is the Economic Development Agency for Northern Ireland. We offer the business community high-quality services, programmes, support and advice helping businesses function efficiently and compete successfully locally and internationally and support FDI projects into the jurisdiction.

Northern Ireland has developed deep expertise in trading & banking technologies. With leading banks BNP Paribas, Citi, Danske, and Lloyds all having a presence in the province, technologists in NI have developed a range of technology solutions for the banking and capital markets industries.

Over 2,000 software engineers and systems architects are employed in Northern Ireland in the development of trading technology platforms for global capital markets and financial services companies including CBOE Hanweck, Citi, CME Group, Cowen Group, FD Technologies, Ion Fidessa, Neueda, Options, Redline Trading Solutions, TP ICAP and Vela Trading Technologies.

Both Queen’s University Belfast and Ulster University in Northern Ireland have trading rooms in collaboration with financial industry partners. These dynamic learning environments enable Northern Ireland students to build skills and capability for the future through engaging with finance and risk challenges under real time trading conditions.

There are nearly 43,000 employed in the Financial and related Professional Services sector in NI. One in four are employed in areas of Fintech expertise including trading and payments technologies, regtech, insuretech, cybersecurity as well as pioneering activity in disruptive technologies such as AI and data analytics.

Northern Ireland is the world’s top region for Financial Services technology inward investment projects (fDI markets FT 2020). Our capital city, Belfast, has been identified as a top 3 Fintech location of the future after London and Singapore (fDI markets FT 2019) and has been ranked one of the top 10 European Tech Cities of the future by the Financial Times, fDi Intelligence.