Hong Kong is the world's leading international finance centre in terms of total foreign-owned banking assets.
With large international banking groups rethinking their global strategy and often reducing operations to their core markets, it is interesting to see which financial centres have attracted the largest foreign-owned banking assets.
Unsurprisingly, Hong Kong, one of Asia’s leading financial hubs and the gateway to the booming economy of mainland China, tops the table, with a total of $1358bn in assets owned by foreign banks in the 2011 financial year. It may be more surprising, however, to see the western European centres of Paris and Brussels in second and third place, respectively. Foreign subsidiaries based in Paris registered an aggregate loss of more than $3bn in the past financial year.
