20 March 2012

The Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI) 11

The GFCI provides profiles, ratings and rankings for 77 financial centres, drawing on two separate sources of data – instrumental factors (external indices) and responses to an online survey. The GFCI was first published by the Z/Yen Group in March 2007 and has subsequently been updated every six months. Successive growth in the number of respondents and data has enabled us to highlight the changing priorities and concerns of financial professionals over this time, particularly since financial crises began to unfold in 2007 and 2008. This is the eleventh edition of GFCI (GFCI 11).

Offshore centres have suffered significant reputational damage in the past four years. In GFCI 10 several of these centres were beginning to recover and this trend has continued. Jersey, Guernsey, the Cayman Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Isle of Man, Gibraltar and Mauritius (listed in order of GFCI rank) have all made modest gains in the ratings. Jersey and Guernsey remain the leading offshore centres. A number of our respondents believe that centres like Zurich, Geneva and Luxembourg,whilst not geographically ‘offshore’, compete in a similar manner to the genuinely offshore centres. It is interesting to note that Zurich, Geneva and Luxembourg have all risen in the GFCI 11 ratings.

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