The definition of a financial center is bound up in the definition of a city. We can start by observing that financial centers are cities or districts of cities where finance is conducted. However, the definition of a city is problematic, as anyone who has tried to compare city populations knows. Is Paris bigger than London? Did we mean the core city, perhaps the medieval walls, the city as defined by political boundaries, the greater metropolitan area? In certain cases, such as offshore centers like the Cayman Islands, the financial center is really just the jurisdiction.Likewise, the definition of finance is problematic. All cities have financial transactions. Is a shipping transaction finance? Paying for fuel? When does a shipping transaction become just finance? Are we talking about transactions that are wholly financial? Funding a vessel, insuring it? So much finance is conducted electronically that one might be able to claim that server farms located anywhere are financial centers.Z/Yen’s definition — “financial centers are places with strong concentrations of financial professionals and their firms.” It’s the people that matter.Financial centers funnel investment toward innovation and growth. Vibrant, competitive financial centers give cities economic advantages in information, knowledge and access to capital. A strong financial center, whether domestic, niche, regional, international or global, connects the wider economy to the global financial community. Cities that are part of the global financial network gain from global trade and growth. Inward and outward investment opportunities increase the wealth of cities that have financial centers and the wealth of their citizens.‘Traffic’ between the domestic economy and the global financial community is critical to national economic performance. The key function of the domestic financial community is not its ability to service the domestic economy’s needs domestically, but rather its ability to service the domestic economy’s needs wherever and however they are best serviced. But after a point a well functioning financial center attracts global financial transactions in its own right, and this confuses matters.Community — financial centers are both ‘open’ and ‘closed.’ Access to the community needs to be via confirmation of identity and qualifications. At the same time, a too closed community cannot grow. A wider discussion might explore how diaspora often succeed internationally in growing networks, but with too restricted access to the community for outsiders they often fail to grow financial centers. A successful financial center’s over-riding principle is ‘treating all comers fairly.’ This obviously underscores recent emphasis on the ‘rule of law’ as a key institution. Payment services — are typically based around trade. Financial centers often grow from trade finance, and are thus often associated with ports or logistics interconnections. • Investment services — with the increasing recognition that a financial center can be significant without a large domestic economy, think Zurich, Geneva, Singapore, or Hong Kong before the 1997 transfer of sovereignty, it is more evident that financial centers facilitate multi-party investments, most often cross-border. Distribution and concentration — sophisticated financial centers often move into wholesale insurance and reinsurance, allocating risk capital where needed and adjusting returns from capital to provide good prices