International Directory of Custodian Banks

International Directory of Custodian Banks refers to directory of global custodians and sub-custodians, published by Asset International along with Global Custodian Magazine issues. Global Custodian Directories refers to online version of directory.

About/Preface
For many years GlobalCustodian.com have fielded inquiries from banks, clients of banks, vendors and other service providers asking them to restore the directory that was once an integral part of the Global Custodian Agent Banks survey.

That the directory had fallen into abeyance was not an accident. Compiling a directory is a difficult task. It involves the collation, analysis, checking, manipulation, standardisation and presentation of thousands of small pieces of information collected in a variety of formats over many months. Global Custodian's decision to combine this information with data derived from three separate surveys conducted between 2004 and 2006 turned a difficult task into one of fiendish complexity.

Some notes from history of custodian industry
Theory suggests that markets with an average of four contenders must be characterized by low barriers to entry and a high degree of competition on price and service quality, yielding benefits to clients in the form of lower prices and innovative products. Yet the securities services markets do not correspond to theory. Rather, they are characterized by a steady shrinkage in the number of providers, limited direct competition between those that remain, near-total opacity on price, an almost complete absence of innovation, a host of essentially bogus service commitments, tacit agreements not to encroach on the territory of competitors that are often clients as well, and unceasing efforts to raise the barriers to entry by controlling the strategy and limiting the ambitions of the infrastructure of depositories and clearing houses that support the securities services industry. An interesting question is why regulators are content to let an industry that is already closer to cartelization than competitive markets to continue to consolidate. For consolidating it certainly is.

The earliest incarnations of the Global Custodian Magazine global custody survey included ABN Amro, Bankers Trust, Boston Safe, Chemical Bank, Manufacturers Hanover, Midland Bank, Royal Bank of Scotland, and SG Warburg. Where are they now? Not in the tombs and sepulchres of mortality but devoured by others, for the most part. Another custodian in those early surveys, JPMorgan, lives on in name only after a merger with Chase that had nothing to do with the securities services industry. 2006 ended with the news that the Bank of New York, a bank that has built its business during the last 20 years mainly by acquisition -- the two boldest were Irving Trust in 1988 and Pershing in 2003 -— had now acquired Mellon. The creation of a global custodian with $16.6 trillion of assets in custody perhaps marks the point at which the global custody industry began its final evolution from a current state of oligopoly into a duopoly indistinguishable for practical purposes from monopoly. Nearly three quarters of all assets in global custody by value are now the preserve of just four banks, two of which are subject to insistent speculation about their appetite for the business in the long term.

The Major Global Custodians
* The Bank of New York
* BNP Paribas
* Brown Brothers Harriman
* Citigroup
* HSBC Securities Services
* Investors Bank & Trust
* JPMorgan Worldwide Securities Services
* Mellon Group
* Northern Trust
* PFPC
* RBC Dexia Investor Services
* Société Générale Securities Services
* State Street

Sub-Custodians — The Countries Covered
Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bermuda, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Botswana, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Egypt, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, ICSDs, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Jamaica, Japan, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Mauritius, Mexico, Morocco, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nigeria, Norway, Oman, Pakistan, Palestinian Autonomous Area, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Qatar, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sri Lanka, Swaziland, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uruguay, USA, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia, Zimbabwe

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