Global Financial Centres Index

The Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI) was first produced by the Z/Yen Group in March 2007 following another research project into city competitiveness we undertook in 2005. The aim of the GFCI is to examine the major financial centres globally in terms of competitiveness. The GFCI has been published every six months (although the index is actually produced every three months).

We have been able to increase the number of respondents and additional data in successive editions of GFCI and this has enabled us to highlight the changing priorities and concerns of finance professionals across a period of great economic instability.

The GFCI provides profiles, ratings and rankings for 75 financial centres drawing on two separate sources of data – instrumental factors (external indices) and responses to an online survey.

We would be grateful for your opinions on any financial centres with which you are familiar.  Please be assured that answers will be kept confidential.  The questionnaire should take less than five minutes to complete.  If you provide an email address, in return we will send you a copy of the next GFCI report.

GFCI 7 Published

Click on the image below to download a copy of copy of the report.

Previous GFCI reports can be viewed as pdf by clicking the thumbnails below:

Mark Yeandle, Jeremy Horne, Nick Danev and Alexander Knapp of the Z/Yen Group 30 pages, City of London Corporation (September 2009)	Mark Yeandle, Jeremy Horne and Nick Danev of the Z/Yen Group 56 pages, City of London Corporation (March 2009)	Mark Yeandle, Jeremy Horne, Nick Danev and Ben Morris of the Z/Yen Group 20 pages, City of London Corporation (September 2008)

Mark Yeandle, Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris of the Z/Yen Group 80 pages, City of London Corporation (March 2008)	Mark Yeandle, Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris of the Z/Yen Group 78 pages, City of London Corporation (September 2007)	Michael Mainelli and Mark Yeandle of the Z/Yen Group 64 pages, City of London Corporation (March 2007)

The data now held includes over 51 thousand assessments from over three thousand respondents. The dataset used to model GFC 7 includes over 8.5 million data-points. This allows us to create financial centre profiles based on 3 axes:

‘Connectivity’ – this represents how well known a centre is around the world and how connected is it to other financial centres. The measure draws on the questionnaire data, whereby respondents are asked to assess only those centres with which they are personally familiar.

‘Diversity’– the breadth of industry sectors that flourish in a financial centre. We consider this ‘richness’ of the business environment to be similar to biodiversity and use a combination of biodiversity indices (calculated on the 64 instrumental factors for each centre) to measure this. A high score on this measure means that a centre is well diversified.

‘Speciality’– the quality and depth of certain industry sectors in a centre, such as asset management, investment banking and insurance. A centre’s performance on this dimension is calculated from the difference between the GFCI rating and the industry sector ratings. If a centre is well above its overall GFCI rating in the industry sectors it is profiled as a specialist.

Below, ‘Diversity’ (Breadth) and ‘Speciality’ (Depth) are combined on one axis to create a two dimensional table of financial centre profiles. The 75 centres are each assigned to a profile on the basis of a set of rules for the three measures:

This profile ‘map’ shows the eight ‘Global Leaders’ (in the top left of the table) which have both broad and deep financial services activities and are connected with many other financial centres. This list includes London, New York, Hong Kong and Singapore, centres that have been identified as the leading global financial centres in previous editions of the GFCI. Paris and San Francisco are ‘Global Diversified’ centres as they are equally well connected but do not exhibit the same depth in different activities to be considered ‘Global Leaders’. Similarly, Geneva and Luxembourg are ‘Global Specialists’ (specialising primarily in Asset Management) but do not have sufficiently broad ranges of financial services activities to be ‘Global Leaders’. The four ‘Global Contenders’ of Beijing, Dubai, Moscow and Shanghai are profiled as global because there is widespread awareness of their activities, but their financial services are not currently sufficiently broad and deep to be considered leaders. Below the profiles are mapped against GFCI 7 ranges:

London and New York still lead the field although the gap between them and the third placed centre has been steadily cut from 81 points a year ago and 45 points 6 months ago to just 36 points now.

More information

Methodology

Instrumental Factors