REPORT: GloCoBank Annual Workshop (17 April 2026)

The GloCoBank project held its fifth and final annual workshop on Friday 17th April 2026 at St Hilda's College, Oxford. The aim of the workshop was to gather together the wider GloCoBank research team, associates and guest contributors to mark the end of the project, review the project's outputs and achievements and to position the research team for the next phase of data analysis.

The morning of the workshop focused on reviewing the project's regional and thematic work packages - European Networks (Sabine Schneider, Marianna Astore, Jamieson Myles), Correspondents and Crisis (Akram Beniamin, Marco Molteni), East Asian Networks (Nora Yitong Qiu), and Central & South American Networks (Manuel Bautista-Gonzalez). This was followed by a presentation from PI Catherine Schenk on her forthcoming monograph, 'The Architecture of the Global Payments System Across the Long 20th Century, covering themes such as globalisation and deglobalisation, the role of technology, public vs private interests, key institutional structures and cooperation vs competition.

In the afternoon, Giovanni Pala and Marco Molteni talked through the data analysis work package, from initial collection of the source material, extraction methods, both manual and using new AI technologies and a comparison of the two, archival validation, and developing visualisations. They were joined by Catherine Schenk who presented sample visualisations for Europe, South America and Africa and the case of Midland Bank using the quinquennial London hub data for 1920-86, and then network visualisations for the period 19990 to 2007, using the example of Moscow.

This was followed by a soft launch of the new visualisation tool that the Project has been developing with the Digital Scholarship (DiSc) team at Oxford. Guest speaker Alexander Shiarella (DiSc) presented an overview of the project and a demo of the prototype web tool which workshop participants were invited to try for themselves using with an Italian dataset. More to come on this...

At the end of the day we were delighted to welcome Goetz von Peter, Bank of International Settlements, who gave a keynote on ‘Global bank linkages and financial centres'. Using BIS statistics covering more than 40 years of data on 200 countries and jurisdictions – including major offshore centres - the presentation characterised financial centres by the network of international financial linkages. Discussing different types of network data and concepts to characterise networks, the presentation showed that the presence of international hubs is a prominent and lasting feature of the global financial system.

Our thanks to everyone who contributed to the workshop and over the course of the Project.

Workshop programme

10:00 – 10:30	Introduction and review of project activities and outputs Catherine Schenk, University of Oxford
10:30 – 11:00	European networks Sabine Schneider, University of Oxford; Jamieson Myles, University of Geneva; Marianna Astore, University of Insubria
11:00 – 11:20	Correspondents and crisis Akram Beniamin, University of Oxford (Assoc); Marco Molteni, University of Turin
11:50 – 12:20	The architecture of the global payments system across the long 20th century Catherine Schenk, University of Oxford
12:20 – 12:40	Asian networks Nora Yitong Qiu, University College London
12:40 – 13:00	Central & South American networks Manuel Bautista-Gonzalez, University of Oxford (Assoc)
14:00 – 15:30	Data workshop and launch of new visualisation tool Catherine Schenk, University of Oxford; Giovanni Maria Pala, University of Oxford; Marco Molteni, University of Turin; Alexander Shiarella, DiSc, University of Oxford
16:00 – 17:00	Keynote: ‘Global bank linkages and financial centres’ – followed by Q&A Goetz von Peter, Bank for International Settlements, Basel
16:00 – 17:00	Closing remarks Catherine Schenk, University of Oxford
18:30	Workshop dinner Discussion of project outputs and ongoing data analysis and collaborations