PrimaryBid triumphs in retail campaign
All investors matter. That was the title of an open letter, posted back in April by app-based retail platform PrimaryBid to the boards and managements of UK companies, then pouring out emergency capital raisings in a desperate effort to re-enforce...
Country risk: Confidence shaken in UK investor outlook
Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party was elected on a pledge to “get Brexit done”, a message that chimed with some of those who had simply had enough of three years of social division and parliamentary logjam. And with the government emerging...
Retail investors: the new lords of misrule
Retail investors have played a big role in a rebound in global equity markets that seems bizarre in the context of Covid-related economic challenges, but makes more sense given the determination of central banks to support asset values. Analysts from...
Lack of licensing clarity tempers Ethiopian mobile money optimism
Ethiopia is one of the three sleeping giants of the mobile money industry, according to the GSMA’s State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money from 2018, which points to the country’s enormous potential for uptake if it has the...
Asia and coronavirus: The road to health
A common metaphor in economic literature likens problems in economies to maladies that afflict human bodies: ‘the health of the economy’; ‘the sick man of Asia’; ‘the body politic’. It is not an encouraging comparison. Middle-aged readers trying to stay...
Providence, Cinven and KKR launch first strike in public-to-private M&A
At the start of June, listed Spanish telecom company MasMovil announced that it had received a takeover approach from a consortium of private equity bidders comprising Providence Equity, Cinven and KKR. MasMovil, which has been busily acquiring smaller competitors such...
Yum IPO hits the spot as Chinese firms target Hong Kong listings
For investment bankers in Hong Kong, June 19 will be just another in a long line of very big days. On Friday morning, they will be ushered in, bank by bank, to meet in person – no Zoom meetings here...
Deutsche has big ambitions for new International Private Bank
In June, Deutsche Bank announced the latest step in its restructuring: the creation of a new unit, its International Private Bank. This now becomes a prominent part of the larger private bank division, dominated by retail banking in Germany, that...
New deposit platforms show limits of negative rates
In June, Sweden’s Klarna, one of Europe’s biggest fintech companies, and UniCredit-owned HypoVereinsbank, both announced plans to distribute deposits through Berlin-based Raisin’s WeltSparen platform. Previously, in April, Deutsche Bank started distributing other banks’ deposits to its wealth management and branch...
Macaskill on markets: How to fight the Fed
An experiment in credit market sponsorship by the US central bank began on May 12 with its first corporate bond exchange-traded fund purchases. The new world of government support began not with a bang but with a whimper. Although the...