46% of accountants confident in Singapore’s importance as a global financial hub

36% say that their city had become ‘much more important’ as a financial centre.

The financial crisis has actually been beneficial for Singapore’s fortunes as a financial centre, a new survey by the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants has revealed.

The latest edition of ACCA’s Global Economic Conditions Survey – the largest of its kind in the world with more than 2,000 respondents – included questions which set out to measure the impact of the 2008-9 financial crisis and the subsequent global downturn on the significance of financial hubs around the world.

The results showed that Singapore is one of the clear winners from the downturn, gaining in significance as there are clear signs of an intensifying global power shift from developed to emerging economies, along with a shift from the traditional centres of economic power in Europe and the US.

Nearly half or 46% of all respondents in Singapore rated it as a centre of global significance, which is well above the average of 18% across all locations; while another third or 34% rated it as a centre of regional significance, again much higher than the global average of 24%.

Overall, ACCA members located in financial hubs were more likely to say their cities had become more important (36%) as to say they had become less important (15%). However the ratio in Singapore was much more favourable, with 61% saying it had become more important, as opposed to 9% who said the city state has become less important as a centre. In fact, 36% of respondents in Singapore report that their city had become ‘much more important’ as a financial centre.

ACCA’s survey documents a general shift in financial influence, with Africa and the Asia-Pacific region emerging as the clear winners. For individual markets, results suggest that mainland China, excluding Hong Kong, was the biggest winner among the selected countries.

Mr Darryl Wee, country head of ACCA Singapore said: “It’s not a secret by now which way the global balance of power is shifting. What’s more interesting are the detailed findings which show a small group of global financial centres, including Singapore, enjoying an ever-growing advantage over their competitors.Going forward we expect that many emerging economies will redouble their efforts to develop global financial clusters.”

The main survey showed that for the first time since the surveys began, there had been a loss of confidence in the Asia Pacific region, with Hong Kong and Malaysia particularly affected, while the Chinese mainland has managed only a small loss of confidence. Only Singapore has bucked the trend by recording further confidence gains.

ACCA believes that this quarter’s findings have been heavily influenced by the catastrophic events in Japan. Overall, more respondents in the region still believe that global economic conditions are improving or about to do so (49%) than the opposite (41%). But the report also notes that there is a wider trend at play; the region’s accountants have seen ever smaller confidence gains in the last two years and the recovery in Asia is being delayed by the Western world’s continued economic malaise.