The world’s biggest banks

The world has a new biggest bank after US financial giant Wells Fargo snapped the top spot from China’s ICBC in terms of market capitalization.

According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, it’s not the first time that Wells Fargo has overtaken ICBC, with it first happening on 26 June.

“It has traded the lead with ICBC four times since,” the publication reported. “[However], Wells has maintained the top spot since July 12 and has, on average, maintained a larger market cap than ICBC over the past 30 days.”

Asian banks rose to the top of investors’ hot lists amid the financial crisis in 2007, when western banks crashed and burned causing investors to view the region as high-risk.

According to the WSJ, however, the tides have turned, as worries mount that China’s economy is looking down as a government-engineered credit crunch sent interest rates into double-digit territory in June.

On the other side of the world, the U.S. economy is slowly returning to normalcy, and banks return to health.

The following table lists the largest banks in the world by market capitalisation (as of 30 July 2013), and the number of customers they serve (pulled from latest annual reports).

* minimum estimate from available information

Not every banking giant makes its customer base clearly known.

In the case of the China Construction Bank Corp, in its latest financial reporting, the bank notes an increase in individual customers of 8.2% – but provides no actual figures to indicate the client base.

However, the report indicates a 40.7% increase of individual online bankers, which means the bank has at least 120 million customers.

With the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, the bank once again does not provide actual figures of its client base – but does reference that one in three Australians banks with them.

CBA operates globally in Asia (China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Singapore, Vietnam), the UK, New Zealand and the USA. No specific client numbers were available, except for Indonesia, in which CBA serves 84,000 clients.

A look at local

South African banks understandably don’t come close to the largest banks in the world in terms of market value, as most of the listed bank above cover a client base higher than the South African population.

South Africa’s biggest banking group by market capital, Standard Bank, carries a market cap of $18 billion the and is listed in the Forbes 2000 as the largest company in South Africa, and the 231st biggest company in the world.

Standard Bank also has the most retail customers in South Africa, with 10.4 million customers as of its last financial reporting, taking the top spot from Absa Bank.

Absa has faced a tough time in the market, and on 30 July reported that it had lost 12% of its customer base, including a 3% drop in retail customers to 9.4 million.

Earlier this month, regulators approved Absa Group’s R18.2 billion acquisition of Barclays’ African business, which would add 3.17 million customers to the bank, operating under the name Barclays Africa.

Barclays Africa (click to enlarge)

The second largest banking group by market cap is the FirstRand Group. FirstRand holds Rand Merchant Bank, WesBank and the group’s main retail bank, First National Bank (FNB). At its last reporting, FNB had 7.5 million customers in South Africa, and 1.2 million customers in Africa.

Banking operations in South Africa

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