Measuring financial centres

The Global Financial Centres Index

The most widely quoted measure of financial centres is the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI), which the London think tank Z/Yen Partners has published twice a year since 2007, now in collaboration with the China Development Institute in Shenzhen.¹ The index combines instrumental factors, which are quantitative indicators drawn from external sources such as the World Bank, the OECD and the Economist Intelligence Unit, with assessments given by financial services professionals through an online questionnaire. In GFCI 39, published in March 2026, the index drew on 34,468 assessments from 5,218 respondents and covered 120 financial centres worldwide.² The top four positions were held by New York, London, Hong Kong and Singapore, each separated from the next by a single rating point. Zurich ranked eleventh with 738 points, a gain of five places over GFCI 38 although its rating fell by five points. Geneva dropped four places to eighteenth, while Dubai rose to seventh and Abu Dhabi to twenty-first.³

GFCI 40, released in the middle of September 2026, confirmed the leading group and brought a modest improvement for both Swiss centres. It was based on 144 instrumental factors and 39,531 assessments from 6,147 respondents.⁴ New York again led with 761 points, followed by London, Hong Kong and Singapore, and Shanghai moved into fifth place. Zurich entered the top ten with 749 points, eleven points more than in March. Geneva climbed six places to twelfth, while Dubai stood ninth and Abu Dhabi thirteenth. Frankfurt, by contrast, fell fourteen places to twenty-ninth. The report observed that only four Western European centres remained in the global top twenty, compared with seven in the previous edition, and that London continued to lead the region.⁵

Read over several editions, the index tells a consistent story. Zurich belongs to the group of centres that lie just below the four global leaders, alongside Shanghai, Shenzhen, Seoul, Tokyo, San Francisco and the two Emirati centres. It has never been a contender for the top four in the index, because it lacks the depth of the capital markets of New York and London and the gateway function that Hong Kong and Singapore play for Asia. Within Western Europe, however, it ranks consistently second or third after London, ahead of Frankfurt, Paris and Amsterdam. Its strongest scores lie in infrastructure and reputation. In GFCI 39 it placed twelfth for infrastructure and fifteenth for reputation among the five areas of competitiveness that the index distinguishes.⁶

The limits of rankings

Rankings of this kind must be used with caution, and three limitations deserve particular attention. The first concerns method. Because the assessments in the GFCI come from respondents who choose to answer an online questionnaire, and whose ratings of their own home centre are excluded, the result reflects perceptions held by professionals in other places.⁷ Perceptions follow news. A large bank failure, a spectacular money-laundering case or a new tax incentive can move a centre several places within six months, although the underlying economic substance has barely changed. The movements of Geneva between GFCI 38, 39 and 40, which took it from fourteenth to eighteenth and then to twelfth within a year, illustrate how volatile the ratings are in the crowded middle of the table, where a handful of rating points separates ten centres. The second limitation concerns aggregation. The GFCI treats a financial centre as a single object, although centres specialise. Zurich is strong in cross-border wealth management, insurance and reinsurance, asset management and financial technology, weak in commodity finance and modest in equity capital markets. A single rating averages over these differences.

The third limitation is the most important for the purposes of this chapter. Rankings measure the reputation of a centre among professionals, and reputation is only loosely correlated with the decisions of clients. A Gulf family that moves its wealth to Zurich after the outbreak of a regional war, or a German entrepreneur who establishes his holding company in the canton of Schwyz, does not consult an index. Such decisions depend on legal certainty, personal relationships, language, tax and a sense of physical and political security that rankings capture only indirectly. The index is therefore a useful barometer of professional sentiment, which needs to be supplemented by indicators that count money, companies and people.

Other indicators

The most relevant indicator for Zurich is cross-border wealth, meaning the financial assets that private clients book in a country other than their country of residence. The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) has estimated this market for many years in its annual Global Wealth Report. The 2026 edition, published on 27 May 2026, contained a symbolic finding: Hong Kong had for the first time overtaken Switzerland as the largest booking centre for cross-border wealth. Hong Kong’s offshore assets rose by 10.7 per cent in 2025 to about USD 2.9 trillion, driven largely by inflows from mainland China, while global cross-border wealth reached USD 15.7 trillion.⁸ The margin was narrow. According to press reports on the study, BCG put Hong Kong at USD 2.95 trillion and Switzerland at USD 2.94 trillion, with growth of 7.6 per cent for Switzerland. For the period to 2030, the authors expected annual growth of about nine per cent in Hong Kong and Singapore and of about six per cent in Switzerland.⁹ The chapter on private banking in Part H has already discussed the finding in more detail. Its significance lies in the difference in the sources of growth: Hong Kong grows with a single hinterland, while Switzerland continues to draw on clients from Western Europe, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia.¹⁰

The Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) publishes its own figures in the annual Banking Barometer. According to the 2026 edition, assets under management in Swiss banks rose by 4.8 per cent in 2025 to a record CHF 9,729 billion. Clients domiciled abroad held 45.9 per cent of these assets, a share that had stood at 49.3 per cent in 2015 and declined mainly because of the strength of the franc. Cross-border private client assets, adjusted for currency effects, rose by 7.6 per cent to CHF 2,945.7 billion, which matches the BCG estimate closely.¹¹ The same report counted 92,002 full-time equivalents employed by banks in Switzerland at the end of 2025, a decline of 2,345 positions within a year, while the aggregate net income of the sector reached an all-time high of CHF 73.8 billion.¹² The combination of record assets and falling employment reflects the absorption of Credit Suisse by UBS and the consolidation of the private banking sector described in Part G and Part H.

Assets under management in the broader sense show a different picture, because they include institutional mandates and investment funds. Singapore reported total assets under management of S$6.7 trillion, about USD 5.2 trillion, at the end of 2025, an increase of ten per cent. Seventy-six per cent of these assets came from investors outside Singapore, and net inflows reached S$376 billion in the year.¹³ The Hong Kong Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) recorded HK$42.2 trillion, or USD 5.4 trillion, in its asset and wealth management survey for 2025, an increase of 20 per cent. The private banking and wealth management business accounted for HK$12.9 trillion of this total.¹⁴ These totals are not directly comparable with the Swiss figure, because each authority defines its population of managers and its asset categories differently. They show, however, that the two Asian centres have reached a scale that places them on a level with Switzerland.

Insurance and listings complete the picture. In insurance, and above all in reinsurance, Zurich holds a position that no Asian or Gulf centre matches. Swiss Re, Zurich Insurance Group and a cluster of reinsurers and brokers make the Zurich region one of the largest reinsurance centres in the world, together with the United States, Germany and Bermuda. In 2019 the fifty reinsurance companies supervised by FINMA generated gross premiums of CHF 51 billion.¹⁵ The history of this cluster is set out in Part E. Listings point in the opposite direction. In 2025 Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (HKEX) raised about USD 37.4 billion through 119 initial public offerings and regained the position of the world’s leading listing venue for the first time since 2019.¹⁶ The SIX Swiss Exchange, which Part H presents, remains a respected market for large Swiss companies with a high share of foreign investors, although it attracts only a small number of new listings each year and almost no foreign issuers from outside Europe.

A comparison of these indicators suggests a simple division of labour. Zurich leads in the depth and diversity of its cross-border wealth management and in insurance. It holds a solid position in asset management and a strong one in financial technology, where the Global Fintech Hub ranking cited by the canton places Zurich third worldwide behind Singapore and Stockholm.¹⁷ It is weaker in equity capital markets and in any business that requires a large domestic population of clients. Measured by these indicators, Zurich’s competitors are not the same in each segment. London competes in asset management and capital markets, Singapore and Hong Kong compete in Asian wealth, Dubai in wealth from the Middle East, South Asia and Russia, and Geneva in private banking and commodity finance.

Notes

1. Long Finance, “The Global Financial Centres Index”, https://www.longfinance.net/programmes/financial-centre-futures/global-financial-centres-index/: the index was launched in 2007, appears in two reports a year and is “published by the Z/Yen Partners in collaboration with the China Development Institute”. GFCI 40 was released on 16 September 2026. ↩
2. Z/Yen Partners, “Press Release: Global Financial Centres Index 39: Top Four Financial Centres Clear Leaders”, March 2026, https://www.zyen.com/news/press-releases/press-release-global-financial-centres-index-39-top-four-financial-centres-clear-leaders/. The release also records that respondents ranked predictability as the most important quality of financial regulation, followed by speed of response, flexibility and quality, while cost came last. ↩
3. Z/Yen Partners and China Development Institute, The Global Financial Centres Index 39, March 2026, rankings table and Western Europe commentary, https://www.longfinance.net/documents/4325/GFCI_39_Report_2026.03.26_v1.1.pdf. In the same edition Frankfurt ranked fifteenth, Luxembourg sixteenth, Paris nineteenth, Amsterdam twentieth, Milan forty-fifth and Liechtenstein ninetieth. ↩
4. Business Today, “GIFT City climbs nine places to 37th in Global Financial Centres Index”, 17 September 2026, https://www.businesstoday.in/markets/story/gift-city-climbs-nine-places-to-37th-in-global-financial-centres-index-556209-2026-09-17. ↩
5. Z/Yen Partners and China Development Institute, The Global Financial Centres Index 40, September 2026, rankings table and Western Europe commentary, https://www.longfinance.net/media/documents/GFCI_40_Report_2026.09.16_v1.2.pdf. Luxembourg ranked seventeenth, Paris twenty-third, Amsterdam twenty-sixth, Milan sixty-second and Liechtenstein ninety-first. Western European respondents supplied 35 per cent of all assessments, respondents from Asia and the Pacific 31 per cent. ↩
6. GFCI 39 (n. above), areas of competitiveness. The five areas are business environment, human capital, infrastructure, financial sector development and reputation. ↩
7. Long Finance, “GFCI Methodology”, https://www.longfinance.net/programmes/financial-centre-futures/global-financial-centres-index/gfci-methodology/: “Assessments from respondents’ home centres are excluded from the factor assessment model to remove home bias.” Responses are collected via an online questionnaire that runs continuously and is sent to a target list of respondents. ↩
8. Boston Consulting Group, “Hong Kong Surpasses Switzerland as the World’s Largest Cross-Border Wealth Hub, Driven by Mainland China Inflows”, press release, 27 May 2026, https://www.bcg.com/press/27may2026-hong-kong-surpasses-switzerland-largest-cross-border-wealth-hub. The report puts global financial wealth at USD 333 trillion in 2025 and records growth of 11.1 per cent in cross-border wealth booked in the United Arab Emirates. ↩
9. The Standard (Hong Kong), “Hong Kong overtakes Switzerland as world’s top cross-border wealth hub on China ties, report shows”, 27 May 2026, https://www.thestandard.com.hk/finance/article/333094/Hong-Kong-overtakes-Switzerland-as-worlds-top-cross-border-wealth-hub-on-China-ties-report-shows. The article quotes the BCG authors as saying that Hong Kong is “cementing its role as China’s gateway to global markets, though that same concentration ties its trajectory tightly to economic and regulatory developments on the mainland”. ↩
10. finews.asia, “Global Wealth Report: Hong Kong Overtakes Switzerland”, May 2026, https://www.finews.asia/finance/44906-global-wealth-report-hong-kong-overtakes-switzerland. The article notes that more than 60 per cent of the assets managed in Hong Kong for cross-border clients originate from mainland China and that the ten largest centres capture nearly 90 per cent of new cross-border inflows. ↩
11. Swiss Bankers Association, Banking Barometer 2026, chapter “Wealth management”, https://publications.swissbanking.ch/banking-barometer-2026-en/wealth-management. The editorial deadline of the report was 13 August 2026. ↩
12. Swiss Bankers Association, Banking Barometer 2026, executive summary, https://publications.swissbanking.ch/banking-barometer-2026-en/executive-summary. ↩
13. Caproasia, “Singapore MAS Asset Management Survey Report 2025”, 27 August 2026, https://www.caproasia.com/2026/08/27/singapore-mas-asset-management-survey-report-2025-total-5-2-trillion-s6-7-trillion-aum-private-equity-venture-capital-622-billion-hedge-fund-268-billion-reit-97-billion-real-estate-104/, summarising the survey of the Monetary Authority of Singapore. The survey counts 1,320 registered and licensed fund management companies, 1,406 variable capital companies and 3,443 sub-funds. ↩
14. Asia Asset Management, “Hong Kong asset and wealth management industry sets new record HK$42.2 trillion of assets in 2025”, July 2026, https://www.asiaasset.com/corporates/hong-kong-asset-and-wealth-management-industry-sets-new-record-hk42-2-trillion-of-assets-in-2025/, reporting on the SFC survey published on 2 July 2026. Net fund inflows reached HK$2.1 trillion, and investors from outside mainland China and Hong Kong accounted for more than 54 per cent of the assets managed in the city. ↩
15. Schweizerischer Versicherungsverband (SVV), “Zürich als führender Hub der Rückversicherung”, 21 February 2022, https://svv.ch/de/hintergruende/kontext/zuerich-als-fuehrender-hub-der-rueckversicherung. The association puts the number of specialists working in Swiss reinsurance at about 2,500. ↩
16. 3E Accounting Hong Kong, “Hong Kong Leads Global IPOs in 2025 with US$37.4 Billion Raised”, January 2026, https://www.3ecpa.com.hk/regulatory-and-business/hong-kong-leads-global-ipos-in-2025-with-us37-4-billion-raised/, citing HKEX data. The largest listing was that of the battery maker Contemporary Amperex Technology (CATL), which raised more than USD 5 billion in May 2025. ↩
17. Kanton Zürich, Amt für Wirtschaft, “Finanzdienstleistungen”, https://www.zh.ch/de/wirtschaft-arbeit/wirtschaftsstandort/finanzdienstleistungen.html, summarising BAK Economics, Finanzplatz Zürich 2025/2026. According to the page, the financial sector generated a gross value added of CHF 32.8 billion in 2023 and employed more than 103,400 people, so that one in six francs of value added and one in ten jobs in the region depend directly on it. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.