The Government’s Strategy to develop the international financial services sector, ‘IFS2020’, was launched in 2015. Ireland has, at the end of 2018, over 44,000 people directly employed in the IFS sector. The growth in the sector under the IFS2020 Strategy has not been limited to Dublin. Over a third of the jobs are located in other areas of the country. The sector has a significant presence across the country in a number of regional locations including high quality jobs in the border region, in Cavan, Drogheda, Dundalk, Leitrim, Letterkenny, and Sligo.
In Co Cavan, the American international insurance company Global Indemnity Services Limited has a base, as does Liberty Insurance. In Co Louth, American firms such as PayPal and State Street and the Japanese firm SuMi Trust have bases. AvantCard announced new jobs in Leitrim this week. In Letterkenny, Pramerica has a sizeable operation, as does the UnitedHealth Group.
The IFS2020 annual action plan 2017 included an increased focus on the regions and contained an action measure to promote international financial services on a regional basis. It also contained a measure to map research and innovation activities in financial services across Ireland. The IDA and Enterprise Ireland continue to actively pursue opportunities across a number of sectors.
The focus on balanced regional development was reiterated in the action plans for 2018 and 2019. An action measure in the 2019 action plan is to ‘Promote regional locations for second-site operations to support growth by IFS companies located in or near Dublin’ and the IDA has an active ‘Second Site’ strategy where companies in Dublin are encouraged and supported to establish a second office in a regional location. Work on this action plan measure will be led by both Enterprise Ireland and the IDA. The agencies will report in the fourth quarter of 2019 on their work on this measure to the public sector High Level Implementation Committee, which is chaired by Minister of State D’Arcy. The focus on regions will continue as part of the new Strategy as recently announced by the Minister of State at the European Financial Forum in Dublin Castle.
