China is expected to replace the United States as the world's largest banking market by 2023, raising pressure on Western banks to brush off the effect of the credit crisis, said the international accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC).

During and after the global financial crisis of 2008, many Western banks were hit hard causing the value of their assets to shrink dramatically. Chinese banks, however, were almost unaffected by the storm and have continued to dominate global rankings by market value. And lenders have already secured heavy emerging market exposure to tap into booming demand for financial products from young and increasingly wealthy populations, it said.

China's economy and wealth have been expanding faster than the United States and the UK. Its domestic banking assets are expected to be more than $30 trillion by 2023, said PwC.

PwC's chief economist John Hawksworth urged Western lenders, whose power has been sapped by the credit crisis, to heed the accelerating shift in global economic power and claim a share of emerging markets' relatively untapped populations.

"With populations of well over 1 billion each, access to markets like China and India is critical for growth," he said.