North America

With 75 banks signed up in late September, IIN is already approaching 100 banks convinced that blockchain is the best, safest and quickest way to resolve blocked cross-border payments.

Speed bumps appear to be gathering favour among stock exchanges, but their potential to level the playing field in the FX market is tempered by concerns around transparency and the impact on trading costs.

Morgan Stanley looks best in the third quarter, but was just pipped by Goldman over a longer term analysis

A prestigious award in economics could encourage complacency, rather than forceful action, on fossil fuel consumption.

Isda needs to take action over manufactured defaults.

The smackdown on greenwashing is coming – and ‘commitments’ to clean energy and environmental practices will not be enough.

Wall Street is turning into a self-driving market, long before automation transforms the physical experience of transportation.

Cut in the teeth of the financial crisis, MUFG’s stake in Morgan Stanley might well be the best deal of the last 10 years. Much of the success is down to the strong personal relationship between the firms’ leaders.

Progress has been made on possible replacements for Libor as a reference rate for financial instruments. But they don’t all have the market thrilling to the prospect of a Libor-less world.

A Greenwich investor survey projects continuing growth in fixed income ETFs as the likely response to deteriorating bond market liquidity.

The Swiss bank is pushing into new territory by taking automated trading into a more complex and less liquid market.

The world of cross-border payments in undergoing a digital transformation, which is set to eradicate long delays, friction and high transaction costs.

Some six months after its FX Link service went live, CME Group reckons the benefits are being felt beyond the OTC spot FX and FX futures markets.

Participants and analysts have dismissed any concerns about the key findings of the BIS market committee’s electronic markets report relating to the concentration of FX turnover and spot trading fragmentation.

Jon Macaskill profiles the two new co-heads of investment banking at UBS.

Investment bankers hope for an autumn thaw after a spring freeze.

Is former ECB chief Jean-Claude Trichet the real villain of the piece?

Banks and non-banks are battling for market share in a property market that finally seems to be slowing down in the face of multiple headwinds.

Strategic tensions as much as short-term underperformance brought about BAML investment banking head Christian Meissner’s departure, but the corporate and investment bank remains in a strong position

By increasing the size at which a US bank is deemed to be systemically important to $250 billion, the Trump administration has unleashed a wave of merger activity among the country’s regional banks. This is the fervent hope of the investment bankers waiting to do the deals, but the reality might turn out to be rather more complicated than that.

When will the much-hyped M&A boom in the regional US bank sector become reality?

Regional banks in the US are posting record capital markets income, putting them in a strong position to fend off challenges from bigger firms.

Following a recent warning from the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that banks were facing the possibility of an imminent global cyberattack targeting ATMs, banks are being urged to review the operating systems used to run the machines and the security measures in place to detect and prevent cybercrime.

Vancity is the largest credit union in Canada, but by 2007 it was acting like a commercial bank – yet now, after steering every part of the business back to being mission-based, it is delivering record profits, lower risk, new membership and improved employee engagement. Has it shown that the ‘triple bottom line’ of people-planet-profit can be achieved?

Any important new market needs its innovators, cheerleaders and pioneers… As banks try to build more responsible and sustainable businesses, these are the champions of impact banking at 10 of the world’s biggest firms. From green and blue finance to financial inclusion and social banking, they are leading the way and setting an agenda for others to follow.

From the United Nations and the European Commission to customers and shareholders, the world’s banks face increasing pressure not only to consider their broader role in society but also to take actions that have a positive impact on it. There is no doubt that most chief executives take this challenge seriously. Whether they take it far enough remains to seen.

Without a robust mechanism for handling chargebacks, merchants will continue to face sizeable losses from both misguided and malicious fraudulent claims.

Citi is mostly playing catch-up with its new corporate and investment banking (CIB) structure: it makes obvious sense, but despite coming later than many rivals it is still a work in progress.

New efforts to execute equity transactions on blockchain are emerging, for now concentrated in private equity, as disruptors seek to build investor and regulatory confidence in security tokens.

As the 10th anniversary of the failure of Lehman Brothers arrives, I have been asked to share my reminiscences of when I realized a global credit crisis was looming and why so many senior financial figures ignored my warnings.