News and opinion on finance

The return of the global wealth manager?

A look at wealth management earnings at the largest firms at the end of the first quarter proved that the hypothesis is true: wealth management is a good business to be in ...

FCA to lenders: Watch your step

The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has got itself into one of its periodic lathers about the way in which banks secure business from corporate clients. This time it is bothered about the ...

Latin America finance: Coronavirus could have a platinum lining

Covid-19 has caused human suffering across the region – needlessly exacerbated by wilful incompetence and chronic underfunding of public health systems – and imposed a huge economic and fiscal burden that will ...

Spacs prove resilient in shaky markets

Special Purpose Acquisition Companies (Spacs), which use the IPO market to raise funds for acquisitions, have proven their ability to weather the current market turbulence. As of May 21, 26 such IPOs ...

Investment banking: Have suitcase, won’t travel

Since the 2008 financial crisis made large physical networks an unjustifiable luxury, Western banks have increasingly relied on an army of peripatetic bankers to service clients in emerging markets. Take emerging Europe, ...

Country risk: India’s Covid-19 hit may turn it to junk

India’s investor prospects deteriorated more than any other Asian country in the first quarter of 2020, according to Euromoney’s country risk survey. It shed 3.22 points from its risk score tally, extending ...

Pandemic hastens Brazil’s financial shift

Some Brazilian bankers have asked if large drawdowns would inflict psychological damage on retail equity investors. This is important, as the growth of retail had offset this year’s capital outflows from international ...

Iwoca urges CBILS banks to collaborate and requests central bank funding

Christoph Rieche, co-founder and chief executive of iwoca On May 20, the British Business Bank announced the accreditation of six new lenders to channel funding to small businesses under the UK government’s ...

The future of supply chains after Covid-19

Online delivery slots remain elusive, but perhaps the fact that UK supermarket shelves are stacked with toilet rolls and tinned tomatoes once again is a sign that panic buying due to the ...

Country risk: Brazil and Mexico will avoid going the way of Argentina

Argentina’s repayment difficulties are legendary. The country has defaulted eight times since its independence and it is threatening to do so again, as it extends, until May 22, negotiations over a $65 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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, ...

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 ...

RCFs: Maxing out your credit is always very expensive

Ask any corporate what the defining feature of the onset of the Covid-19 crisis was for their business and the answer will be the same: shock at the speed with which all ...

Sideways: Banks get to mark their own balance sheet homework

Deutsche Bank became the latest firm to warn that it will miss capital targets due to provisions and an expanded balance sheet, in a pre-announcement of its first-quarter earnings on Sunday April ...

Will Covid-19 give CEE banks the edge in the fight against fintech?

In central and eastern Europe, some embattled senior bankers are taking comfort in the thought that the Covid-19 crisis might help them see off the challenge from fintechs and other non-bank players ...

DBS’s Gupta pans banks’ dividend cuts, sees Covid-19 as threat to all

When Euromoney catches up with Piyush Gupta, he is keen to discuss the second great financial challenge of the 21st century through both a wide and a narrow lens. Before we speak, ...

Coronavirus: The Asian Development Bank boosts aid for trade

Kenji Yuhaku, senior strategy, policy and partnerships adviser at the Asian Development Bank First in, first out? When China posted a sharp fall in new cases of Covid-19 in early April, followed ...

Country risk: Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia et al demonstrate MENA is not equally fragile

MENA economies are walking on eggshells, with some more likely to crack under the added pressure of coronavirus than others Risk experts have been busy downgrading the Middle East and North African ...

Coronavirus: France takes the lead on SME funding

Given how little cash small businesses tend to keep in reserve, the speed at which banks are able to dispense government-backed emergency loans will be vital to an economy’s ability to weather ...

Coronavirus: Italian banks try to make up for lost time

People queue for food in a street in Italy after stockpiling left many supermarket shelves bareAfter the lockdowns in response to the coronavirus pandemic spread across Europe this March, bankers in Italy ...

UN’s Mohieldin says SDGs are a framework for response and recovery

When the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030 framework was launched in 2015, preparation for the challenges of the future was firmly in mind. Within SDG3 (health), the sub-category of pandemic ...

QE in CEE: What you need to know

Until very recently, bond buying by central banks was a phenomenon limited to the world’s largest and most advanced economies. As the Covid-19 crisis has deepened, however, policymakers in smaller and less ...