New lens on global finance: Abu Dhabi launches debut future-focused competitiveness index

Abu Dhabi has released its first comprehensive global index to measure the competitiveness of international financial centres using data and a future-orientated methodology.

The Stern School of Business at NYU Abu Dhabi unveiled the inaugural Financial Centre Competitiveness Index (FCCI) during the Global Markets Summit at Abu Dhabi Finance Week (ADFW) on Tuesday.

New York, London and Singapore rank as the world’s leading financial centres, while cities in the Gulf are emerging rapidly as competitive global players, the FCCI found. Abu Dhabi leads the Middle East after taking 12th spot, after Zurich, Beijing and San Francisco. Dubai is 14th on the list, followed by Riyadh in 26th and Doha in 29th.

The FCCI has been released by the newly established Institute for Global Financial Competitiveness at NYU Stern Abu Dhabi, supported by Ray Dalio, American billionaire and co-chief investment officer of Bridgewater Associates.

New measures of competitiveness

The FCCI's structure represents a major conceptual shift compared with other global indexes, according to one of its creators.

Traditional rankings tend to reward size history and market value, said Bruno Lanvin, president of the Descartes Institute for the Future, which is leading the project. They give less weight to forward-looking elements such as innovation, talent mobility, technology readiness and regulatory adaptability – key attributes of future leaders.

Bruno Lanvin, president of the Descartes Institute who lead the development of the Financial Centre Competitiveness Index (FCCI).

“We were very interested in identifying the signals that might tell us who would be the big players tomorrow,” Mr Lanvin, who has spent 25 years leading the creation of global benchmarks, told The National.

This was also a consistent request from the financial community, he added. The index uses two umbrella categories: "footprint" measures the current strength of a financial centre and "dynamics" determines its rate of evolution.

For example, a city such as New York maintains a dominant footprint due to its immense market depth and institutional concentration. Yet cities that score highly for dynamics, such as Singapore, Seoul and San Francisco, demonstrate significant future readiness that could lift their global standing in the years ahead. This is what governments and institutions need to know, Mr Lanvin said.

This is necessary because the world has entered what he described as a "Vuca" environment, one of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. “The challenges that financial centres will face in one year, in three years, in five years, can be very different from what we see today,” he said, referring to the rapid growth of artificial intelligence and quantum computing this year. “Financial centres must therefore prepare for disruptions that have not yet materialised.”

Talent is among the most important indicators of this readiness, said Mr Lanvin. Hard skills in terms of industry knowledge, as well soft skills, were key, he added.

He said that "inside financial centres, you need people who understand what their clients want", rather than simply having workers in financial services. The FCCI evaluates educational foundations, the presence of major universities, regulatory talent and the ability of a centre to attract global expertise, he added.

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