Financial centre of the 19th century. After 1870, Berlin and New York grew to become major financial centres mainly serving their national economies. An array of smaller international financial centers found market niches, such as Amsterdam, Brussels, Zurich, and Geneva. London remained the leading international financial center in the four decades leading up to World War I. Since then, London and New York have developed leading positions in different activities and some non-Western financial centres have grown in prominence, notably Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore. In Asia, Tokyo emerged as a major financial centre in the 1980s as the Japanese economy became
Offshore financial centre OFCs on global financial stability. On the 23 June 2000, the IMF published a working paper on OFCs which expanded the FSF list to 46 OFCs, but split into three Groups based on the level of co-operation and adherence to international standards by the OFC. The IMF paper categorised OFCs as a third type of financial centre, and listed them in order of importance: International Financial Centre ("IFC"), Regional Financial Centres ("RFC") and Offshore Financial Centres ("OFC"); and gave a definition of an OFC: The June 2000 IMF paper then listed three major attributes of offshore financial centres: A subsequent