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 a banking licence in a major onshore jurisdiction. The most recent reliable figures for offshore banks indicates that the Cayman Islands has 285 licensed banks, the Bahamas has 301. By contrast, the British Virgin Islands only has seven licensed offshore banks. Offshore financial centre An Offshore Financial Centre or OFC is defined as a "country or jurisdiction that provides financial services to nonresidents on a scale that is incommensurate with the size and the financing of its domestic economy". "Offshore" does not refer to the location of the OFC (many FSF–IMF OFCs, such as Luxembourg and Hong Kong, are located