London is a major global financial center, rivaled only by Tokyo and New York. It leads other cities in the number of international banks, the amount of foreign lending, the activity of the foreign exchange market, and the size of its international insurance business. Many banks are clustered around the Bank of England, insurance companies around Lloyd's of London, and stockbrokers around the London Stock Exchange. British companies traditionally focused their services on only one of these activities. However, with the deregulation of the London Stock Exchange in 1986, known as the Big Bang, many large integrated merchant banking and securities companies arrived from abroad to offer a variety of financial services.
Tourism is another important part of the services sector.
London attracts more than 24 million visitors annually, more than half of them from outside the country. Serving tourists is thought to employ at least 300,000 Londoners. London is the hub of the national transport system of arterial roads, motorways, railway lines, and air connections. Port facilities left the traditional Docklands area starting in the late 1960s for newer accommodations that spread out along the Thames all the way to the river's estuary on the North Sea, in what is known as the East Thames Corridor. The new Port of London, the largest port in Britain, has 84 independently operated wharves and terminals that handle more than 50 million tons of imports and exports annually.