Liverpool’s financial services industry has a long tradition dating back to the city’s heyday more than a century ago, when it was the premier port of the British empire and home to much of the world’s merchant fleet.

Rathbones, the city’s best-known fund manager, was founded as a Liverpool shipping company in 1742, while Philadelphia’s Brown Brothers Harriman, the oldest US private bank, can trace its origins back to Liverpool when the four sons of Alexander Brown, who had emigrated to the US from Northern Ireland, set up a merchant bank in the city in 1810.