Assets under Custody tables & historic data
DATA ON ASSETS UNDER CUSTODY
Since 1999, we have been gathering assets under custody data in order to size the custody market and provide analysts, service providers and others with tables, rankings and historic data through provision of spreadsheets. Custodians' headline figure can refer purely to assets under custody or can extend to assets under custody and/or administration and, in some cases, it can include client assets for other lines of business. We help with drill-down of the headline figures.
DATA DRILL AND TRENDS
Market share and trend data are available to those analysts who require the use of such data in the course of their work. We also provide a drill-down, subject to availability, of the headline figures reported by custodians. This includes distinction of assets by lines of business and also historic splits between domestic and cross-border assets and between those managed directly and those managed as sub-custodian.
DOMESTIC AND CROSS-BORDER CUSTODY ASSETS
Industry practice is to distinguish worldwide custody assets between domestic assets (those held in the home country) and cross-border assets (those held in the rest of the world). We encourage service providers to make this distinction according to the home country of each customer (rather than the country of their head office) as we consider that this paints a more meaningful picture. However, some custodians do not report figures according to this preferred definition.
ASSETS MANAGED AS GLOBAL CUSTODIAN VS. SUB-CUSTODIAN
An aggregate figure for custody assets across a number of providers can involve a degree of double-counting, with some assets being reported by banks acting in the capacity of sub-custodian (for global custodians) and also by the corresponding global custodians. To deal with this, we accommodate analysis to identify those assets managed directly as custodian and those held as sub-custodian.
DRIVERS OF GROWTH
Global custodians are entrusted with the safekeeping and processing of huge volumes of securities. Recent years have seen a dramatic growth in the value of assets under custody. This high growth rate is expected to continue, driven by a combination of global trends:
- investors' growing appetite for cross-border assets, for emerging and exotic markets and for a wider range of financial instruments
- investment managers' and banks' increasing use of global custodians to replace their own networks of local custodians
- in many countries, the state retreating from its role of primary pension provider, causing citizens to invest in defined contribution pensions and mutual funds in record numbers – with custody providers serving the pension funds and mutual funds
- growth in the retail brokerage industry driving demand for clearing and custody of assets.
Since 2004, our sister platform FundServices.net has been sizing the fund administration market. Our spreadsheet services extend to the provision of data to analysts, service providers and others on assets under administration as well as assets under custody.
