The Asian banking group has created a methodology for ranking financial jurisdictions by how fast and deep they accommodate AI, govern it and deliver positive outcomes.

AI has gone from laboratory experiment to offering core financial uses such as trading, risk management and compliance, a new analysis from Singapore-headquartered DBS says. Singapore, New York, London and San Francisco are picked out for leadership along with several measures of AI prowess.

The report, from DBS Group Research, is entitled The Trusted AI Financial Hub: How AI and Trust are Reshaping Global Financial Competition.

Additionally, DBS predicts that with economic reforms in Singapore and the focus on AI, total factor productivity growth could rise by between 0.3 and 0.5 percentage points, compared with flat TFP assumptions in last year’s Singapore 2040 report. With stronger productivity gains, Singapore’s nominal GDP could reach $1.4 trillion by 2040, pushing above earlier forecasts.

The study says that in the AI era, financial leadership will increasingly depend on a hub’s ability to combine AI adoption with trusted governance, digital infrastructure and institutional credibility.

The bank has developed the Global AI Financial Hub Index (GAIFHI), a framework covering AI integration, trust and governance infrastructure, digital financial infrastructure, talent and innovation and AI-driven market outcomes. The DBS report also introduces the AI Governance Intensity per USD trillion intermediate metric, which measures AI governance strength relative to the scale of financial activity intermediated by a hub. 

The analysis spans 15 financial centres and innovation ecosystems, including Singapore, Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, London, Mumbai, New York, San Francisco, Shanghai, Sydney and Tokyo. It evaluates how governance coherence, digital infrastructure, institutional AI adoption, talent depth, market outcomes and capital scale interact to shape competitiveness in the AI era.

Singapore emerges as the open-market hub closest to full “flywheel activation,” a self-sustaining growth momentum. Its strengths are regulatory coherence, digital identity infrastructure, institutional AI adoption and international trust.

New York is still the global capability leader, with unmatched AI depth, talent concentration, capital markets scale and market outcomes. Its constraint is governance fragmentation, the report says.

London is “repositioning rapidly,” supported by a strengthening principles-based AI governance trajectory. Its key constraint is post-Brexit cross-border recognition, the report continues. 

San Francisco is anchored by the deepest concentration of AI talent and innovation capacity in the dataset. This capability has translated directly into financial infrastructure innovation. However, the scale of AI-driven financial activity that can translate into a globally dominant trust signal may be limited.

Elaborating on its home base in Singapore, DBS said: “Singapore appears closest to achieving effective equivalence between AI-assisted and human supervised decisions in practice, placing it near the point of flywheel activation.”

“The constraint is scale. Relative to New York and London, its cross-border capital base remains smaller. Its current advantage lies in a trust premium that continues to attract capital and talent – the strategic risk is whether larger hubs close the AI governance gap before this advantage becomes self-sustaining,” it said.