Kenya’s capital city Nairobi rose eight places in the world ranking of financial centres this year as measured by the Global Financial Centres Index (GFCI) 2021.

The ranking was based on business environment, human capital, infrastructure, financial sector development and reputation.

The ranking shows that Nairobi has improved from position 106 last year to position 98 currently out of the total 196 cities ranked globally. 

Nairobi is also the fifth fourth most attractive financial centre in Africa after Casablanca, Johannesburg, and Cape Town and Kigali which ranked 94.

“GFCI 30 provides evaluations of future competitiveness and rankings for 116 financial centres around the world.

The GFCI serves as a valuable reference for policy and investment decision-makers,” said the report.

Global Financial Centres Index is prepared by the Z/Yen, one of the leading research firms in the city of London.

The report comes barely two months after Kenya launched  the Nairobi International Financial Centre (NIFC) through the National Treasury to attract investments.

Acting NIFC chief executive Oscar Njuguna said in developing the financial centre, “the first thing is to create a more efficient registration framework with a single point of entry which will end the need to go registering in various offices.”

Other incentives are around tax predictability, he said adding: “We have taxes that change every year, sometimes quite considerably.”

Among the key criteria that GFCI also uses are connectivity; how connected the city is to the rest of the world.

The other factor is diversity; which is richness, distribution and evenness of various factors of competitiveness.

The other factor is specialty, which is the depth within a financial centre of the following sectors; investment management, banking, insurance, professional services, and the government and regulation.