Why Companies Are Raising Money Privately Instead of Going Public in London
Charlie Walker, the Deputy CEO of the London Stock Exchange, says London needs more money flowing into its public markets to keep them alive. The remark, reported by the Wall Street Journal, comes from the man who has been the exchange's loudest voice for change since he got the deputy role in September 2023 — a move City A.M. called part of a "reform offensive" (City A.M.).
Walker had been with the London Stock Exchange for six years when he was promoted. He kept running the group's private markets business alongside his new duties. That means he sees both sides: the world of public markets, where anyone can buy shares in a company, and private markets, where deals happen behind closed doors between companies and big investors.
At an LSEG Innovation Forum presentation on 4 November 2025, Walker said that private markets now raise more capital than public markets (LSEG). In other words, companies are increasingly choosing to get funding through private deals rather than by selling shares on the stock exchange. This is the problem the UK's financial watchdog, the FCA, tried to fix with new listing rules that took effect on 29 July 2024.
Under those new rules, called Policy Statement PS24/6, the FCA merged the old "premium" and "standard" listing tiers into a simpler set of categories. Companies already listed were automatically moved into the new system on day one (Davis Polk, Goodwin). The FCA published the final rules on 11 July 2024 (Latham & Watkins, FCA).
Walker has made his case in several places. He wrote about the reforms in an LSEG publication called "Listing the Changes" on 7 May 2024 (LSEG Issuer Services). He explored the same ideas in a feature for The Trade News (The Trade News).
The London Stock Exchange has also been running a series of events called IPO Forums to bring the conversation together. The first was in November 2024, the second on 8 May 2025, and both featured Walker (LSEG, LSEG). The biggest one, on 14 November 2025, was chaired by Walker and was set to close with remarks from Lucy Rigby KC MP, the Economic Secretary to the Treasury (LSEG, LSEG).
The fact that a Treasury minister was on the agenda tells you this is not just the stock exchange pushing its own interests. The government is involved.
The backdrop to all of this is that fewer companies have been listing on the London Stock Exchange in recent years. The FCA's reforms were meant to make listing in London easier and cheaper, bringing the rules closer to what companies face in New York and Amsterdam. But making the rules lighter only matters if investors actually come back and put money into public companies in large enough amounts to make listing worthwhile.
Separately, the London Stock Exchange Group's own share price has been recovering. According to a Reuters report from 11 June 2026, the company's efforts to show it can compete in the age of AI were starting to win over shareholders (Reuters).
That story is different from the listing-reform push, but it feeds the same question: can London become a place where raising money and new technology come together successfully?
Walker's point about private markets raising more capital than public markets is not a prediction. It is a description of what is happening right now. Companies are choosing private deals partly because the rules around going public are burdensome. The FCA's reforms aim to reduce that burden. But they cannot, on their own, make investors change where they put their money.
What the reforms can do is narrow the cost gap between listing publicly and raising money privately. Walker's job, across the forums and his published writing, has been to argue that the gap is closing and that London's public markets are still a good place for companies to raise money. Whether enough companies and investors agree with him is something the next round of listings will reveal.
