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Banking & Finance · Encyclopedia

Banking and finance is the connective tissue that lets capital cross borders, and AJG's reading of the vertical is multilateral by construction — every account-opening, every wire, every offshore structure exists inside a lattice of treaties, sanctions regimes, FATCA and CRS reporting obligations, and correspondent-banking relationships that touch dozens of jurisdictions even when the customer thinks they are dealing with one. The starting fact is that the global banking system is a graph, not a list. SWIFT routes about USD 5 trillion of payments daily across roughly 11,000 member institutions in 200+ countries; the FATF's 40 Recommendations and 9 Special Recommendations set the floor that every reputable jurisdiction implements; the Basel III leverage and capital requirements are translated through national regulators (RBI, MAS, FCA, BaFin, OCC) into the rules a depositor actually feels. The Indian context anchors most of AJG's analysis: the Liberalised Remittance Scheme caps individual outward remittance at USD 250,000 per financial year, the FEMA framework governs every cross-border transaction, GIFT City's IFSC zone offers a regulatory carve-out for international financial services, and the rupee's status as a partially-convertible currency shapes everything from NRI deposits to ECB borrowing.\n\nWealth management at scale crosses three layers — onshore (the country where the client lives and earns), offshore (where the structure holds the assets), and treaty-shopping middle layers (often Singapore, Mauritius, the Netherlands, or Ireland) chosen for tax-treaty advantages. The 2017 Multilateral Instrument under the BEPS framework collapsed many of those middle layers, but a handful survive for legitimate reasons: Singapore's 17% headline corporate rate plus exemptions for foreign-sourced income, the UAE's zero personal income tax with the 2023 introduction of a 9% corporate tax above AED 375,000 profit, Mauritius's GBC structures repurposed post-DTAA-renegotiation. Family offices crossed a regulatory threshold in 2021-2024 across Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and London, with Singapore's 13O and 13U schemes alone managing over SGD 1.5 trillion of declared family wealth by 2024.\n\nFintech access is the third axis — the question of what banking infrastructure a person can actually use. Wise (formerly TransferWise) settles cross-border payments through local clearing rather than correspondent SWIFT and now handles roughly GBP 100 billion annually; Revolut's 50+ million customers move money across 30+ currencies with treasury-grade FX spreads; Mercury, Brex, and Airwallex serve venture-backed and SME segments that traditional banks underserve; emerging-market neobanks like Nubank (Brazil, 100M+ customers), Tinkoff (Russia), and Kakao Bank (Korea) demonstrate that banking-grade trust can be earned outside the legacy system. India's UPI processes more transactions per month than Visa and Mastercard combined globally, a fact that the World Bank's G20 Global Financial Inclusion report frames as a template other emerging markets are now copying.\n\nThe AJG view treats banking-finance as the substrate every other vertical depends on. Visa applications need proof of funds. Real-estate purchases need clean settlement. Trade finance needs LCs, BGs, and supply-chain financing. Tax residency planning needs banking that survives tax-authority scrutiny in two or more jurisdictions. The 28 trade blocs we track each have their own banking-cooperation protocols (the EU's SEPA, ASEAN's ABMI, GCC's clearing union plans, AfCFTA's emerging payment rail). The 273 FTAs we map each have implications for capital flow that are usually ignored in trade-policy commentary. We treat all of these as one system, not separate domains.