About a year back we posted an article on the largest banks in world by market capitalization as on Feb 26, 2009. At that time I was searching for the list of the biggest banks but couldn't find it on internet for free. So, I had to find the market cap of the big banks in the world (finding the names of banks wasn't that difficult).
Recently, I came across the list of biggest companies in the world by their market value published by Financial Times (FT). The list was comprehensive and has details like country and sector so finding the top 10 banks was a very easy thing now. Here's the top ten banks as on March 2010:
| Rank | Company | Country |
| 1 | Industrial and Commercial Bank of China | China |
| 2 | China Construction Bank | China |
| 3 | Bank of America | US |
| 4 | JP Morgan Chase | US |
| 5 | HSBC | UK |
| 6 | Wells Fargo & Co | US |
| 7 | Bank of China | China |
| 8 | Citigroup | US |
| 9 | Banco Santander | Spain |
| 10 | BNP Paribas | France |
There have been few changes in the list to what we published in Feb 2009. As the global financial situation witnessed some improvement, the American banks have regained some of their lost market capitalization thereby helping them to improve their rankings. Compared to Feb 2009 when the top 10 list had four banks from China, two from US and one each from Italy, Japan, Spain and UK, in Mar 2010 there were four banks from US, three from China and one each from UK, Spain and France. However, the Chinese banks still hold the top two slots. This might be because the American banks although bigger than Chinese are yet to fully recover from the financial crisis that had hit the investor's confidence, while Chinese banks being in an emerging economy also commands high valuations. However, what came in surprising is that in the list of top 500 companies in the world there were only seven American Banks, while China has nine banks in top 500. This appears to be bit on the lower side for the country with most number of banks (as per Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation US had 7895 FDIC insured institution as on May 2010) and a highly advanced banking system. Is it because of consolidation in the US banking sector or investor's lack of confidence in smaller banks given the recent series of bank failures.
| Country | No. of Banks in Top 500 Global Companies |
| China | 9 |
| US | 7 |
| Canada | 5 |
| UK | 5 |
| Australia | 4 |
| Brazil | 4 |
| France | 3 |
| India | 3 |
| Japan | 3 |
| Singapore | 3 |
Data Source: Global Top 500
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