global custody assets - custodians, custodial rankings, size, market share concentration

We have prepared a series of tables of custodians - that is, the custodial banks and other financial institutions - depicting rankings by the size of their clients' assets under custody. Each table is available at the full version of this portal, which is reached from the link at the foot of this page.

Drivers of growth

Global custodians are entrusted with the safekeeping and processing of huge volumes of securities. Recent years have seen a dramatic growth in the value of assets under custody. This high growth rate is expected to continue, driven by a combination of global trends:

investors' growing appetite for cross-border assets, for emerging and exotic markets and for a wider range of financial instruments
investment managers' and banks' increasing use of global custodians to replace their own networks of local custodians
in many countries, the state retreating from its role of primary pension provider, causing citizens to invest in defined contribution pensions and mutual funds in record numbers - with custody banks serving the pension funds and mutual funds, their money managers and the banks acting for high net worth individuals
the booming retail brokerage industry driving ever-greater demand for clearing and custody services.

CUSTODY ASSETS
Global or worldwide?
Industry practice is to distinguish worldwide custody assets between domestic assets (those held in the home country) and cross-border, or global, assets (those held in the rest of the world). We encourage banks to make this distinction with reference to the home country of their customers rather than their own head office or customer service locations.

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