Financial centre

A financial centre (financial center in American English) or financial hub is a location with a significant concentration of commerce in financial services.
The commercial activity that takes place in a financial centre may include banking, asset management, insurance, and provision of financial markets, with venues and supporting services for these activities to take place. Participants can include financial intermediaries (such as banks and brokers), institutional investors (such as investment managers, pension funds, insurers, and hedge funds), and issuers (such as companies and governments). Trading activity often takes place on venues such as exchanges and involves clearing houses, although many transactions take place over-the-counter (OTC), directly between participants. Financial centres usually host companies that offer a wide range of financial services, for example relating to mergers and acquisitions, public offerings, or corporate actions; or which participate in other areas of finance, such as private equity, private debt, hedge funds, and reinsurance. Ancillary financial services include rating agencies, as well as provision of related professional services, particularly legal advice and accounting services.
As of the 2025 edition of the Global Financial Centres Index, New York City, London and Hong Kong ranked top 3 globally, while other well known financial centres include Singapore, Shanghai, Frankfurt and Tokyo, amongst others.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) classes major financial centres as: International Financial Centres (IFCs), such as New York City, London, and Tokyo; Regional Financial Centres (RFCs), such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Frankfurt; and Offshore Financial Centres (OFCs), such as the Cayman Islands, Dublin, Cyprus, and Luxembourg. The IMF notes some overlap between Regional Financial Centres and Offshore Financial Centres.
In April 2000, the Financial Stability Forum ("FSF"), concerned about OFCs on global financial stability produced a report listing 42 OFCs. In June 2000, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a working paper on OFCs, but which also proposed a taxonomy on classifying the various types of global financial centres, which they listed as follows (with the description and examples they noted as typical of each category, also noted):
The IMF noted that the three categories were not mutually exclusive and that various locations could fall under the definition of an OFC and an RFC, in particular (e.g. Singapore and Hong Kong were cited).
International Financial Centres, and many Regional Financial Centres, are full–service financial centres with direct access to large capital pools from banks, insurance companies, investment funds, and listed capital markets, and are major global cities. Offshore Financial Centres, and also some Regional Financial Centres, tend to specialise in tax-driven services, such as corporate tax planning tools, tax–neutral vehicles, and shadow banking/securitisation, and can include smaller locations (e.g. Luxembourg), or city-states (e.g. Singapore). Since 2010, academics consider Offshore Financial Centres synonymous with tax havens.
The IMF noted that OFCs could be set up for legitimate purposes (listing various reasons), but also for what the IMF called dubious purposes, citing tax evasion and money–laundering. In 2007, the IMF produced the following definition of an OFC: a country or jurisdiction that provides financial services to non-residents on a scale that is incommensurate with the size and the financing of its domestic economy. The FSF annual reports on global shadow banking use the IMF definition to track the OFCs with the largest financial centres relative to their domestic economies.
Progress from 2000 onwards from IMF–OECD–FATF initiatives on common standards, regulatory compliance, and banking transparency, has reduced the regulatory attraction of OFCs over IFCs and RFCs. Since 2010, academics considered the services of OFCs to be synonymous with tax havens, and use the term OFC and tax haven interchangeably (e.g. the academic lists of tax havens include all the FSF–IMF OFCs).
In July 2017, a study by the University of Amsterdam's CORPNET group, broke down the definition of an OFC into two subgroups, Conduit and Sink OFCs:
Sink OFCs rely on Conduit OFCs to re–route funds from high–tax locations using base erosion and profit shifting ("BEPS") tax planning tools, which are encoded, and accepted, in the Conduit OFC's extensive networks of global bilateral tax treaties. Because Sink OFCs are more closely associated with traditional tax havens, they tend to have more limited treaty networks and access to global higher–tax locations.
Prior to the 1960s, there was little data available to rank financial centres. In recent years many rankings have been developed and published. Two of the most relevant are the Global Financial Centres Index and the Xinhua–Dow Jones International Financial Centres Development Index.
The Global Financial Centres Index ("GFCI") is compiled semi-annually by the London-based think tank Z/Yen in conjunction with the Shenzhen-based think tank China Development Institute. The 37th edition of the GFCI was published on the 20th March 2025.
London, Paris, Amsterdam and New York have long been at the centre of the global financial system. Today there is a diverse range of financial centres worldwide. While New York and London (both referred to as Alpha cities) often stand out as the leading global financial centres, other established financial centres provide significant competition and several newer financial centres are developing. Despite this proliferation of financial centres, academics have discussed evidence showing increasing concentration of financial activity in the largest national and international financial centres in the 21st century. Others have discussed the ongoing dominance of New York and London, and the role linkages between these two financial centres played in the financial crisis of 2007–08.
Comparisons of financial centres focus on their history, role and significance in serving national, regional and international financial activity. Each centre's offering includes differing legal, tax and regulatory environments. One journalist suggested three factors for success as a financial city: "a pool of capital to lend or invest; a decent legal and taxation framework; and high-quality human resources".
New York, London, and Tokyo are in every list of major IFCs. London and New York have at times exchanged places as the worlds preeminent financial centre and London has been competing for New York's crown as a financial capital and Fintech capital of the world. Some of the major RFCs (see next section), such as Paris, Frankfurt, Chicago, and Shanghai appear as IFCs in some lists.
These centres appear in all FSF–IMF lists of OFCs and, bar the Caribbean OFCs of the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, and Bermuda, represent all the major OFCs. Some also appear as RFCs in various lists, particularly Hong Kong, and Singapore. They also appear on most lists of major tax havens, and on lists of the largest Conduit and Sink OFCs in the world.
In some lists, RFCs such as Paris, Frankfurt, Chicago, and Shanghai appear as IFCs, however, they do not appear in all lists. They are certainly major RFCs.
Primitive financial centres evolved in the 11th century in the Kingdom of England at the annual fair of St. Giles and in the Kingdom of Germany at the Frankfurt autumn fair, then developed in medieval France during the Champaign Fairs.
The first real international financial centre was the city state of Venice which slowly emerged from the 9th century to its peak in the 14th century. Tradable bonds as a commonly used type of security, were invented by the Italian city-states (such as Venice and Genoa) of the late medieval and early Renaissance periods while Florence can be said to be the birthplace of double-entry bookkeeping from the publication and proliferation of the work of Luca Pacioli.
In the sixteenth century, the overall economic supremacy of the Italian city-states gradually waned, and the centre of financial activities in Europe shifted to the Low Countries, first to Bruges, and later to Antwerp and Amsterdam which acted as Entrepôt cities. They also became important centres of financial innovation, capital accumulation and investment. By the early 1800s, London replaced Amsterdam as the world's leading financial centre.
London and Paris were the world's only prominent financial centres throughout most of the 19th century. After 1870, Berlin and New York grew to become major financial centres mainly serving their national economies. An array of smaller international financial centres found market niches, such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Zurich, and Geneva. London was the leading international financial centre in the four decades before World War I. Since then, New York and London have developed leading positions in different activities and some non-Western financial centres have grown in prominence, notably Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore and Shanghai.
London has been a leading international financial centre since the 19th century, acting as a centre of lending and investment around the world. The Bank of England, founded as a private bank in 1694, took on the role of a central bank with the Bank Charter Act 1844. English contract law was adopted widely for international finance, with legal services provided in London. Financial institutions located there provided services internationally such as Lloyd's of London, founded in 1686, for insurance and the Baltic Exchange, founded in 1744, for shipping. During the 20th century London played an important role in the development of new financial products such as the Eurodollar and Eurobonds in the 1960s, international asset management and international equities trading in the 1980s, and derivatives in the 1990s. Long standing as the world's largest currency trading hub, today London accounts for over a third of global forex trading.
The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 by the Federal Reserve Act after a series of financial crises, particularly the panic of 1907, led to the desire for central control of the monetary system. Since the middle of the 20th century, New York City, represented by Wall Street in Manhattan's Financial District, has been described as a leading financial centre. Over the past few decades, with the rise of a multipolar world with new regional powers and global capitalism, numerous financial centres have challenged Wall Street, particularly London, and several in Asia, which some analysts believe will be the focus of new worldwide growth. In 2018, New York was described as extending its lead as the world's centre of finance due to the value of domestic and international financial activity like managing assets and issuing equity, which underscores the position of New York as the world's leading financial centre. A recent source has shown London narrowing the gap between the two cities.
In Asia, Tokyo emerged as a major financial centre in the 1980s as the Japanese economy became one of the largest in the world. Hong Kong and Singapore developed soon after leveraging their links with London and Britain. In the 21st century, other centres have grown including Sydney, Seoul, Shanghai and Astana. Astana International Financial Centre has become the fastest growing financial hub in Central Asia. Dubai has become a centre for finance in the Middle East, including for Islamic finance. The rapid rise of India has enabled Mumbai to become an emerging financial centre. India is also making an International Financial Centre GIFT City from scratch. GIFT city is now functional and has already won the crown of fastest emerging International Finance Centre of South Asia. Linked to the rise of these new IFCs, has seen the rise of "partner OFCs" (offshore tax-havens to which funds are routed), such as Taiwan (a major Sink OFC for Asia, and 7th largest global Sink OFC), Mauritius (a major Sink OFC for South Asia, especially India, and Africa, and the 9th largest global Sink OFC).
The private nationwide financial system in China was first developed by the Shanxi merchants, with the creation of so-called "draft banks". The first draft bank Rishengchang was created in 1823 in Pingyao. Some large draft banks had branches in Russia, Mongolia and Japan to facilitate the international trade. Throughout the nineteenth century, the central Shanxi region became the de facto financial centres of Qing China. With the fall of Qing Dynasty, the financial centres gradually shifted to Shanghai, mainly due to its geographical location at the estuary of the Yangtze River and to the control of customs in China. After the establishment of People's Republic of China, the financial centres in China today are Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen.