Commonwealth Bank of Australia: Why is KKR buying Colonial First State?
The news that KKR will buy a majority stake in the Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s (CBA) wealth management business is striking from both sides of the fence. On the Australian side, the seller, it shows that the banking industry’s commitment...
Finance CEOs urge governments to step up ESG efforts
Thirty private-sector CEOs, including the heads of Bank of America, Citi, Santander, Standard Chartered, UBS and Allianz, have urged the European Commission and global governments to step up the financial sector’s role in financing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and...
Russia’s Sovcombank eyes post-Covid acquisition opportunities
The Covid-19 crisis will accelerate consolidation in the Russian banking sector by creating M&A opportunities, the co-founder of the country’s third-largest privately owned lender tells Euromoney. Sergey Khotimskiy, who set up Sovcombank in 2001 with his brother Dmitry, says the...
Italian banking system goes on blockchain to cut operational risk
At the end of April, 32 banks in Italy went into full production with one of the first large-scale deployments of blockchain in interbank markets. While JPMorgan was far ahead of the pack in October 2018, when it launched the...
Mexico resists triple whammy of risks
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (Amlo), the leftist who took over at the end of 2018 and whose first year was marked with an economy declining for the first time since 2009, continues to face formidable problems. Latest figures show...
Responsible finance: All banks dictate outcomes – and other Davos news
My favourite announcement at January’s Davos World Economic Forum 2020 was the launch of the Future of Sustainability Data Alliance with the likes of Refinitiv, the Climate Bonds Initiative, the Global Financial Markets Association and many others spanning academia, policy-setting,...
Special opportunity funds take advantage of the stress through loan to own
Regulators may be granting forbearance from recognizing loan impairments to keep credit flowing, but European banks’ large first-quarter loan loss reserves still exceeded analysts’ expectations. HSBC took a $3 billion charge for the quarter and could reserve from $7 billion...
Financial opacity not a good look for under-pressure China
Throughout the coronavirus crisis, much of the focus on China has been around cause and effect. Questions, redolent of a US Congressional hearing, persist. What did Beijing know and when? Did it try to cover up the outbreak? Had it...
Fall in corporate FX activity moves emphasis away from London fix
In a bid to assess the impact of market stress on liquidity, Mosaic Smart Data, a trading analytics company, recently aggregated volume data from foreign exchange settlement firm CLS over two periods, from January 1, 2018, to February 26, 2020,...
Outlier Peru shows Covid-19’s carnage despite best efforts
There are many countries being roundly criticized for their response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and these bad actors are spread among continents and between emerging and developed markets. With so much noise when looking for correlations between the mass of...