Breaking into a new market is never easy. So if one of your peers has already done the hard work of establishing itself there, and you can use its infrastructure to run your own business, why would you bother following it in? That is the question custodians face when researching new markets that their clients want to access.

Custodians do not have to be based in a country for their clients to be able to hold investments there. Instead they can subcontract the safekeeping of these assets to another company, which can be either a global business already set up in the market or a smaller, local bank.