World Alliance of International Financial Centers
The World Alliance is the leading global platform of international financial centers, acting as a catalyst for bilateral, regional, and global collaboration, fostering financial innovation, and cooperating with major international organizations.
Objectives
The World Alliance promotes international financial centers on a global scale but does not perform lobbying.
The World Alliance helps to share best practices and communicate jointly. The World Alliance works closely together with knowledge partners, e.g., consulting firms, universities, and research institutes.
The main task for the World Alliance legal entity is the coordination of the World Alliance's projects and initiatives. The World Alliance is project-driven, and each project is sponsored by one or more financial centers. The value of the World Alliance is in the success of those projects.
The Role of Financial Centers
Many countries worldwide are developing their financial industry around one or several financial centers. A financial center is a kind of service infrastructure to serve investors and corporate to manage savings and to finance entrepreneurial risk to trigger economic growth in a sustainable environment.
This service center is a mix of technical requirements (physical infrastructure, law, tax and regulatory framework, talent) and business conditions (the association of a critical mass of complementary business lines, e.g., retail and corporate banking, capital markets, asset and wealth management, insurance, consulting, tax and legal advice, infrastructure). All that creates an ecosystem, more or less specialized and of different sizes addressing local, regional, or global targets.
Financial centers have in common to bring to the users the best of needed financial services and access to funding.
Today, the financial industry all around the world is challenged on its value creation, risks, and contribution to growth: Lack of understanding and complexity of the chain of intermediation (services vs. products). It is also challenged by a heavy new regulatory framework, globalization, and new technologies that all combined change significantly its economic balance and business models.
Financial centers have a more holistic position in this game. And different drivers (fixed location, at the core of states or regions) have a specific role in contributing to face those challenges.