Millennial crypto investors ‘can revive London market’

THE London Stock Exchange should court a generation of cryptocurrency investors to revive its fortunes, the City minister has suggested.

Bim Afolami said encouraging the 6m people in Britain who own crypto to buy stocks and shares would help to improve the London stock market’s attractiveness on the world stage.

Mr Afolami said: “Those are not people who don’t want to invest. They’re not people who don’t want to take risks. So the question we are going to ask ourselves is why are they not doing it in mainstream financial markets?

“The holders of crypto assets are overwhelmingly skewed towards people under 40, amongst younger people. Let’s try and get them into the mainstream financial markets.

“I think clearly, a lot of them, if we made the mainstream financial market attractive enough, will do that and that will help the flow of capital into our capital markets.”

Mr Afolami was speaking at a Bloomberg event yesterday, where he said encouraging this age group to invest in stocks could trigger a “capital markets renaissance”. He quoted New Financial, a think tank, which showed the share of UK households that own stocks and shares has more than halved from 23pc in 2003 to 11pc in 2022.

Ownership of cryptocurrency has risen steadily in recent years, with almost one in 10 Britons owning some form of the digital tokens, according to the Financial Conduct Authority.

Declining public interest in the stock market has contributed to fears London is entering a “doom loop” where its fading significance becomes self-reinforcing. The London Stock Exchange has been struggling to attract new companies and to stop businesses that are already listed quitting the market.

Mr Afolami also said he wanted to use the sale of the Government’s 36pc stake in Natwest this year to help “kick-start” an increase in retail investment across the UK to boost the economy.

The economic secretary to the Treasury said the sale would help encourage more young investors into the market. Mr Afolami said he wanted to push back against “the modern trend to seek to eliminate all risk, which has only accelerated after the Covid pandemic”.