OFEX

OFEX’s main objective is to provide an open, transparent, objective, and flexible tool that can be freely used to examine the attractiveness of financial centres, based on recent data available from reliable sources.

Why an Open Financial Ecosystem indeX?

In 2016 after the Brexit vote, experts from the Institut Louis Bachelier (ILB) network wanted to analyse the potential impact that Brexit might have on the dynamics of financial centres. They identified the attractiveness of financial centres as a key element of this analysis, and the ability to measure changes over time as particularly important.

The ILB researchers also noticed a gap in the methodologies available at that time. Therefore it has been decided to develop a new index that could be useful to stakeholders in financial centres around the world, addressing the following challenges:

• Create a comprehensive, transparent, and publicly accessible database,based on data from reliable international sources and qualifying the main aspects of financial centres attractiveness.
• Follow a neutral and rigorous scientific methodological approach to provide a fully independent and open index that allows this attractiveness to be compared.
• Reflect the many aspects of attractiveness for all types of financial actors (banks, insurers,  funds, etc.) via this index.

OFEX journey

The project started in 2017 with a European student challenge that the ILB launched and conducted to define the attractiveness of a financial centre, identify categories of indicators representing attractiveness and propose methods to compare attractiveness based on these indicators. All this work was supervised by a qualified international jury under the presidency of André Lévy-Lang, president of ILB.  In the follow-up to the competition, a workshop with experts was organised to define the guidelines for the continuation of the project, the analyses to be carried out, the data to be used and the appropriate methodology. 

A first version was developed by the ILB in 2021 focusing on the collection of appropriate indicators and the implementation of a methodology for computing an index from indicators, based on the OECD ‘Handbook on Constructing Composite Indicators’.

A second version was produced in 2022 in partnership with the Centre for Financial Studies, with an in-depth review of the input data (especially ESG and fintech data) and methodology, including the perimeter of financial centres covered and the projection of data from countries to financial centres level.

Finally, after a global review of the data and the methodology used based on feedbacks from stakeholders of the financial ecosystem, a first shared version of OFEX was released in November 2023.

The graph below shows the key moments in the development of the project.

OFEX components

The index is based on 55 indicators organized under 4 categories that should encompass most factors representing attractiveness:

• Financial and economic sector development: representing the most important category
• Human capital, Business environment and Infrastructure: these three categories are gathered in the Working Environment macro category