METHODOLOGY

Global Investor's Global Custody Survey measures customer satisfaction by means of questionnaires completed by fund managers with respect to the services of global custodians. This year, 1,254 questionnaire responses were received, of which 1,025 qualified. For a response to qualify, the primary business of the respondent must be either asset management, insurance or the management of a pension fund. The respondent must also deal with two or more global custodians. Global Investor magazine has a defined group of readers, fund managers. Fund managers are in the unique position of having regular contact with a wide range of custodians and are best placed to compare their services. Each response is carefully screened to ensure that it meets the set criteria. In order to qualify for the overall ranking, banks must receive a minimum of 25 qualified responses, of which a minimum of five must be from outside the bank’s domestic market. For the purposes of the survey, Europe is treated as a single market. This proviso ensures that all qualifiers have a truly global presence outside their home market. Ranking methodology entails respondents rating their counterparties out of ten (ten being excellent and one very poor) across 25 separate service categories encompassing securities services and treasury services. Respondents were also asked to give each service category an importance rating out of 10 (one being totally unimportant and ten being very important). This allows the fund manager to evaluate the custodian according to the services that they find important. UNWEIGHTED SCORES The rating and importance scores are multiplied together to produce a category score for each of the services. Each of the service category scores is then averaged, and the average scores are added together and divided by 25 (the number of categories). In order to avoid bias from those respondents who are more diligent, if a respondent neglected the importance component a default average (based on the first 100 qualified responses) is used. WEIGHTED SCORES The weighted result allows fund managers with more assets under management to have a greater influence on the rankings. The respondents are split into three categories (as to their assets under management) and the following weightings applied: 0.5 = the smallest 25 percent (representing the fewest assets under management) 1.0 = the middle 50 percent 1.5 = the largest 25 percent FOOTPRINT SCORES The footprint score is calculated for each custodian as its total unweighted score multiplied by its number of qualified responses.