China’s ICBC is the World’s largest bank: Banker magazine

China’s Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) has displaced Bank of America (BoA) from The Banker magazine's annual list of the top 1,000 banks with most capital. BoA was down to third from its first position in 2012, and JP Morgan Chase retained its second spot. The total capital for the top 25 banks has increased 10.8 per cent, predominantly thanks to the growth of Chinese banks, and the capital-to-assets ratio continues to strengthen, to 5.16 per cent. But compare this with the 13.4 per cent rise for Tier 1 across the Top 1000 as a whole, which brought the aggregate capital-to-assets ratio to 5.48 per cent. The dramatic growth and profitability in this ranking tends to be found further down the scale. In fact, the minimum Tier 1 capital needed to enter the Top 1000, which has grown every year in the past decade except in 2011’s ranking, raced ahead this year to cross the USD 300m mark for the first time, reaching USD 342m. China had four banks in the top 10 and 96 in the Top 1,000. UK’s HSBC ranked fourth in the list. Africa, meanwhile, came up as a top performer this year. At 2.3 per cent, it now has a higher share of global profits than Western Europe, despite accounting for less than 0.8 per cent of global assets. Overall, pre-tax profits for the Top 1000 in the 2013 ranking increased by 6.7 per cent, compared with a decline of 1 per cent in the previous year.