Our global offer to business - additional information

Methodology

The centres have been chosen based on their rankings in other major indices, such as the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report and Z/Yen’s Global Financial Centres Index, as well as their overall international financial activity.

Where the report refers to ‘global financial centres’ or ‘GFCs’, it refers to the following centres: London (UK), New York City (US), Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo (Japan), Frankfurt (Germany) and Paris (France).

The benchmarking model is based on analysis of 100 unique metrics across five key competitiveness dimensions. Three of these metrics are used to support the assessment in more than one competitiveness dimension. For example, ‘digital skills’ are relevant in both ‘innovative ecosystem’ and ‘access to talent and skills’. This results in the analysis using 102 metrics in total.

Data is collected at a national and city level, depending on the availability of such data. Where metrics are at city level – such as ‘cost of living’ – data has been collected for each market’s main financial centre.

Where possible, the data collected is covering the five-year period between 2020 and 2024. Where 2025 data is available the five-year period used is between 2021 and 2025. The data is normalised to make relative comparisons between different types of data (values, ratings, index scores, percentages) possible. The most competitive data point between 2020 and 2024 across all centres – for example, the largest amount of assets under management – is assigned a score of 100. The least competitive data point is assigned a score of 0. All other data points are scored relative to the maximum and minimum values.

The mean of all metrics scores in each of the five competitiveness dimensions constitutes a centre’s score in this dimension. Where data is unavailable for a centre, the mean has been adjusted accordingly.

A centre’s overall score is produced by calculating the mean of the centre’s five dimensional scores, with each dimension having an equal weighting of 20%.

The relative year-on-year competitiveness score change has been calculated using revised figures and updated metrics; therefore it should not be compared with the competitiveness scores published in earlier editions of City of London Corporation’s ‘Our global offer to business’ report.