The Top 100 Financial Services Brands in the World

Comment by Luke Owen on April 8, 2009 at 10:59am

That's interesting. I believe the Brand Financial "Global Banking 500" report has HSBC as the number one financial brand. Determining top brands is tough but there's no question that brand value is huge in terms of acquiring, retaining and cross selling. Especially in today's environment.

Comment by Brian Hanafee on April 8, 2009 at 12:39pm

47. Providian Financial
Really?

Comment by Eric Meyerson on April 8, 2009 at 12:50pm

Interesting, but "in the world" doesn't seem correct. Where are all the foreign FIs?

Comment by Stephanie Fierman on April 8, 2009 at 3:09pm

I would recommend that BankInnovation pull this list and start over. First, there doesn't appear to be any 'tabulation' going on - the order of companies listed seems as if it was pulled directly from the Corebrand list at http://tinyurl.com/dc94mu. Second, I believe that many would consider your selections to be off-target - Dow Jones and Bloomberg (the latter being listed twice) does not belong on a list with banks and investment firms. A different list - most influential media and publishing companies (with Dow Jones and so on) - might be interesting, but it's a different list. Third, Eric is correct in questioning the "global" part. Corebrand may use the word "global," but only U.S. executives are polled - so its America's opinion of a global list. Big difference. FYI (from the Corebrand press release at http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/Corebrand-963093.html: "The Corporate Branding Index®, a quantitative research study among business decision makers IN THE USA, has been conducted continuously since 1990 with 1,200 companies across 49 industries. Over 12,000 surveys are completed annually."

Please: your readership deserves better content.

Comment by Mary Wisniewski on April 8, 2009 at 5:38pm

To answer the question about defining global, Corebrand classifies a company as global if it exists in more than one country; however, all survey respondents were based out of North America.

Comment by Mary Wisniewski on April 9, 2009 at 11:53am

As to companies appearing more than once, here is the reasoning. For one, Corebrand will continue to track non-existing entities to see how their reputations evolve over time. For two, Corebrand also tracks companies based on division of businesses, geography, clients' requests, etc. This means similar company names (i.e. Bloomberg and Bloomberg LP) are tracked and ranked.

Comment by JJ Hornblass on June 4, 2009 at 9:23am

To (belatedly) add to Mary's comments, the tabulation we did included determining that Bloomberg and Dow Jones are, in fact financial services brands, as well as media brands. Both Bloomberg and Dow Jones, for example, provide services well beyond what we would consider pure media, meaning audience. Both companies are heavily engaged in providing quantitative services to the financial services sector. Just to illuminate this point, Bloomberg terminals are equally quantitative analytical tools as they are dispensers of news or aggregators of eyeballs. Besides, financial services media is a part of the financial services industry -- and should be considered as such, at least for the purposes of brand qauntification.

Second, I hear what the commentators to this post are saying about the global nature of the list. We relied on Corebrand for its tabulation, and we think it is a fair representation of brand ranking (granted, Providian and Bank One are problematic). That said, here is the BrandFinancial list. Perhaps between the two we can iron out a true assessment of brand value for banking:

1 HSBC
2 Bank of America
3 Wells Fargo
4 Santander
5 ICBC
6 American Express
7 Citi
8 BNP Paribas
9 China Construction Bank
10 JPMorgan Chase

Here is a link to BrandFinance's Global Banking 500.

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