Shenzhen has made the top 10 in the Global Financial Centers Index (GFCI) ranking recently released by Z/Yen Partners in collaboration with the China Development Institute.
The GFCI’s 31st edition provides evaluations of future competitiveness and rankings for 119 financial centers around the world. The GFCI serves as a valuable reference for policy and investment decision-makers.
Among the indexes, Shenzhen took the sixth place in the fintech category, the first among the cities on the mainland.
GFCI is the world’s most authoritative comparison of the competitiveness of the world’s leading financial centers. Over the past 16 years, GFCI has published two reports a year charting the progress of the world’s leading financial centers.
It took five years for Shenzhen to jump from the world’s top 20 into the world’s top 10, data from Shenzhen Local Finance Administration showed. In 2016, the added value of the city’s financial industry was 287.6 billion yuan (US$45.11 billion), accounting for 14.8% of the city’s GDP. In that year, the city ranked the 22nd in GFCI ranking, following Hong Kong and Shanghai.
In 2021, despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the added value of the city’s financial industry reached 473.8 billion yuan, accounting for 15.4% of the city’s GDP, ranking the first among the industries.
The balance of loans supporting technologies in 2021 was 638.7 billion yuan, up by 39.4% over the previous year.